Jj is for Jottings 40. A Listening Activity.

If you have read the introduction to “Aa is for Alpacas”, you will be aware that I have flagged poor listening skills as a growing problem in this increasingly visual world. Children who are poor listeners are limited in their ability to learn in many areas of life, but particularly at school, since teaching will usually have both visual and auditory components (and sometimes auditory only).
Listening isn’t just one thing – there are a number of auditory skills a child needs to develop: being able to attend to sounds, to remember them, to be aware of the directions from which the sound is coming, to repeat the sound (if it is a speech sound), to be aware of sounds in the environment, to be aware of rhythmic patterns, to isolate a sound from a variety of different sounds, to pick out sounds from background noises, to get the meanings from spoken language, to fuse the sounds arriving from two ears into one message.
Here is a very simple activity you can do with your young child. Say: “Close your eyes and listen carefully. Tell me all the sounds you can hear.” You might hear a clock ticking, the hum of a refrigerator, traffic noise outside, a bird call, wind etc. You might want to make it more fun by using a blindfold – a scarf or something similar. Being able to see whilst doing this will distract your child from listening. In my experience, visual stimuli tend to take precedence over auditory ones. I have noticed that even older children can miss some of the sounds at first – they need to “tune in”.
Although this little exercise isn’t directly related to speech and reading, it is a great starting point for increasing auditory awareness, which underpins speech and reading.