Making the Most out of your Listening Resources

Listening resources are a great tool that are heavily used in the primary classrooms, however, there are lots of benefits to using "Listening to Reading" in the upper elementary classrooms as well. They provide a fluent model for students and can help to increase student's vocabulary. This is especially important in classrooms where there is a larger population of Learning Support or ELL students. One problem that many teachers encounter though is that there are not enough age appropriate resources for those upper elementary students or they do not have time to fit "Listening to Reading" into their busy schedules...until now...

This year our Language Arts block is transitioning from a 120 minute block to a 90 minute block. Therefore, that doesn't leave a lot of time for students to be able to listen to reading. The reasoning is because our teachers now have to teach Science and Social Studies everyday. Therefore, we need to be clever with how to implement this. One way is to use cross curricular resources for listening.

Science: Many programs come with their textbooks on CD. During this block of time students can use the CD for "Listen to Reading." Our new science program "Interactive Science" by Pearson has a leveled reader database available. You can register your account (via the green cardboard case with the registration code inside) and access content leveled readers that are available by many different leveling systems, including the DRA. You can then electronically assign readers to students where they can listen to the selection read aloud online by a fluent reader.

What more could you ask for?

Scholastic Readers: There is a student view for your student's scholastic reader online. You can put the link on your website and have students access it from their net books. You can have it read to them using the on level feature or below level feature. View the online user guide below to see all of the Scholastic Reader's features:

Scholastic Online User Guide
Cross curricular resources are a great way to fit in those standards
that that we need to teach to help our students become better readers.

Happy Listening!