Put on Your Listening Ears

 The beginning of the year is a time best spent on teaching expectations and procedures to set the tone for the rest of the year. One of the expectations we work on is listening skills.  Two books that I use to help are Listen Buddy by Helen Lester and Howard B. Wigglebottom Learns to Listen by Howard Binkow.

After reading the stories, we discuss what it means to be a good listener.  We also work on retelling the story. We mainly do this orally at the beginning of the year, but sometimes I will model the writing portion or we will complete it together.  Either way, there are several options for graphic organizers to choose from:

I also like to ask comprehension questions to see if students can recall information from the text:

To extend the lesson, your students can put together a bunny craft.  Students can choose whether they want their bunny to be brown like Buddy:

or white like Howard B. Wigglebottom:

 

On the ears students can write what it means to be a good listener, why it is important to be a good listener, etc.  Students can either leave the ears standing tall, or fold an ear down to add a little personality to their bunny craft.

You can find all of these things in this pack:

For even more reading ideas, you can take a look at these blog posts.

Happy Teaching!