Some listening activities

Activity for 1st cycle of primary: LISTEN AND MATCH
Activity: Food bingo.                                                      Whole-class activity
Materials: Food figures/ Flashcards and Bingo Cards      Individual work

In this game or activity, pupils will be provided with a bingo card, one for each pupil, where different kinds of food words appear along with theirs pictures (butter,soda drink, banana, sausage...).

After that, the teacher will say out loud many different food names. Meanwhile, pupils will have to watch figures or flashcards, listen carefully and match what is being said by the teacher with the names and pictures that appear on their own bingo cards. The first child to cross off all the names on his/her bingo card wins the game.

Aims of the activity:

• Pupils will be able to identify and remember the food.
• Pupils will be familiarized with the correct pronunciation of the food.

The activity could be implemented by drilling the words (foods in this activity) as they appear. The voice can be altered, to improve pupils’ pronunciation in a controlled way.

We had realized by doing this task that firstly we have to attract the students’ attention. Make sure everyone was listening and watching. If possible, show them what to do –give a demonstration or example: showing what to do is more effective than telling what to do. You can demonstrate the activity by playing both parts yourself (moving position to show that you are two people), by playing one part and choosing a strong student to play the other part, or by asking two strong students to do (part of) the activity in from of the class. In our performance as we were a group, we did it ourselves.

We think that monitoring what the pupils are doing is just as important a skill as the teaching. When pupils are engaged in the activity, our aims will be to see if they have understood our instructions, to assess how well they are performing the task.

Activity for 2nd cycle of primary: LISTEN AND DRAW
Activity: Draw what you hear.                                     Whole-class activity
Materials: Pieces of paper, crayons, felt-tip pens, etc. Individual work

The idea of this activity is for children to listen to a story, or part of a story, without seeing the book illustrations. They need to create a drawing in their mind of what is happening.

Once they’ve created a picture in their mind, then it’s time to actually draw it using art materials.

A story we could use for this activity is “Meg and Mog on the moon”. It is a very original illustrated book and it also allows you to change different details of the story.

It can become very motivating for pupils, because the drawings they create are uniquely theirs and valuable because of their individuality.

With this activity pupils can:

• understand and identify specific information in an simple oral text about a trip and apply it in a drawing.

Activity of 3rd cycle of primary: LISTEN AND GUESS

Activity: From Crossword to role-play                                 Individual and Pair work

Materials: Crossword                                                         Whole-class activity

Each pair of pupils will be provided with a blank crossword. Previously, the teacher had split the paper with words across and down so that one of the pupils will have to complete the words across and the other the words down without showing each other. 

Later, taking turns, one pupil will describe a word (for example, part of the face that is between the eyes and the mouth: nose) and the other will guess it, until they have their crossword finished. 

Then, pairs will write a sentence for each word in order to use them to make up a short dialogue for role-playing: ‘at the doctor’:

-          Good Morning! What part of your body hurts?

-          Hello! I have a pain in the eye, nose, leg, headache,…

With this game pupils will have to use their imagination and creativity.

Aims of the activity:

• Pupils will be able to identify, describe and express orally the parts of the human body.
• Pupils will be able to ask and answer for the location of a pain/an illness/ a part of the body.

After implementing  Communicative  activities in class.

We chose three activities, adapted to a singular/particular course,    explained the aims we wanted our students to achieve with it and the     classroom management.       When doing these activities, we found that adapting them to the    different cycles and grades is not an easy task, because we have to    take many factors into account if we want that the activities to be    useful and communicative for our pupils.      We learn to formulate the aims/goals putting the learner at the center of   the process. In addition, we found that it is not easy to give instructions to   explain what an activity is about and we often complicate when and what to   say. It is much better to give simple and direct orders so that students can    better understand the message, beacuse if they are complex we risk they do   not understand us.      With the activities developed in class (the Food Bingo, Draw what you    hear and crossword) we had to look what we wanted our students to do.    They were easy at first, and harder gradually. We learned how to drill, not    only by repeating words but changing our voices' volume (louder or lower).       Finally, we would like to add that in these activities we learned that as    teachers we must be aware that not all activities are for all students as they    all have a number of individual characteristics that we should not overlook.