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I'm happy to continue a discussion on listening skills from my prior blog post, " What are the 7 Root Origins of Poor Listening Skills ?"  This past blog reviewed the cognitive skills behind listening.  Now, I would love to share the games and activities that I use to improve listening skills in my own students. It's all in the Presentation: Here are three magic steps: Motivating lesson titles can hook your learners and feed eager and enthusiastic attitudes.  Upbeat and animated presentations can grab your students' attention and get them engrossed in the content.  Integrate fun and interactive games that reinforce the concepts so that the content sticks.  Games and Activities that Strengthen Listening Skills: If you know anything about me, you know that I love games and fun, multisensory activities.  In fact, if I don't already have a game or fun activity to practice new concepts, then one is quickly created.  Here are some of my favori...

It is easy for parents and even teachers to lose their cool when children do not listen to repeated directions. So, if kids aren’t making sense of what they hear, how can the learning process even take place? To solve this problem, it is necessary to uncover the root causes of poor listening skills.  Then, one must find the individualized, cognitive-based culprits for each student.  What are the Cognitive Skills Behind Listening? There are a number of core cognitive skills that support one's capacity to listen: Attention - Attention is the ability to tune into information, sensations, and perceptions that are relevant in the moment. Working memory - Working memory is a cognitive function that enables students to recall and use relevant information to complete an activity. It also enables learners to hold multiple pieces of information in the mind and manipulate them. Often described as a mental workspace, working memory helps students stay focused, block distractions and sta...

Inferences or an implied hidden meaning is an abstract higher-order language skill that is challenging to teach and tricky for students to master.  For many concrete learners, taking the leap into hidden meanings is both confusing and frustrating.  Most students first come across inferences when reading books, but I like to prepare and teach my students how to make sense of implied meaning through images, metaphors, product names, games, and more.   7 Fun Strategies that Teach Students How to Uncover Inferences:               1) Review magazine advertisements and search for hidden images and messages that lure buyers to purchase products.  Look at the pictures, words, colors, backgrounds, expressions, layouts, and more.               2) Encourage your students to find their own magazine advertisements.  Ask them to cut out their five favorites ...

The spoken word gives human’s an incredible advantage over other species, but for those that struggle with language processing, this “invisible difficulty,” can create countless challenges.  What’s more, this problem often goes unnoticed and many of these students are misunderstood and mislabeled as inattentive, careless, lazy absent-minded, and defiant. What is a Language Processing Disorder? Language processing disorders are not uncommon, and it is a difficulty that impacts communication and social relations. This disorder can impact a student’s ability to understand language (receptive language) and/or express their thoughts (expressive language). Like many cognitive based challenges, it can manifest in a variety of ways. One student might struggle to outline their thoughts, while another might battle with accessing the right word or name from their memory banks, following a sequence of directives, or even maintaining attention. In addition, a student may experience difficulties...