Listening comprehension is a fundamental building block to reading comprehension development. Now there is new research evidence concerning a growing number of children who fail to develop adequate reading comprehension skills primarily due to poor listening comprehension.
Ever notice that good stories get better student engagement? This research highlights the power of a meaningful story to specifically impact listening behavior.
Why would we want to do this and how does listening affect learning? Our white paper highlights some of the key research in this area as we consider the value of listening skills for our children.
Many English learners are not acquiring the level of academic language needed for college and career readiness. Are we underestimating the impact that ongoing work with oral academic language can have?
Listenwise Premium makes age-appropriate, non-fiction podcasts in several subjects available. You can listen to ELA, social studies, and science podcasts at a cost. When you first sign up as a teacher, you get a thirty-day free trial of Listenwise Premium which gives you access to a full podcast library and interactive transcripts. You also get listening comprehension quizzes and more. How much more? You get access to upcoming Lexile audio measures for content.
Littlest Learners
Elementary
Tween
Teen
Literary Classics
Folk & Fair Tales for All
Love You Forever by Robert Munch
You can find a complete list online. Here are three that caught my eye:
Babies: A series that explores the first full year of life.
Chasing Coral: Follows marine biologists as they invent the first time-lapse camera. The purpose is to record bleaching events in real time.
Our Planet:Explores the natural world. It comes from the creators of the award-winning series Planet Earth.
Conversations with Myself – Free – Alan Watts walks in the mountains. Talks about the limitations of technology and the problem of trying to keep track of an infinite universe. (1971)
Creative Process: Norman McLaren – Free – Explores Norman McLaren’s process of artistic creation. (1990)
Future Shock – Free – A short documentary based on a book written by futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. It’s narrated by Orson Welles. (1972)
My quick picks:
The Great Leap Forward: Addresses questions relevant to artificial intelligence.
Space Shuttle: The Human Time Bomb: This film presents a probing investigation. It seeks to “identify the true culprits behind the disaster.”
Coronavirus: A Global Emergency: From ABC News’, this documentary series tries to explain the COVID-19 crisis.
Reading Vine offers free resources to help improve reading and comprehension skills that include fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essays, and stories. What’s more, questions and answers, worksheets, and activities are also available. A wide variety of educators and parents use Reading Vine to provide personalized reading experiences
Each text comes with an easy to create PDF and reading comprehension questions. An answer key is also included. Add collections of content, or reading sets, to your “My Library.”
To get started with Reading Vine, you can set up an account with either Google or Office 365. Or you can use an email address and come up with a password. Once you have your account or profile set up, you can explore a variety of reading sets.
Once your account setup and reading sets are ready to go, you can create a PDF with favorite passages. These PDFs come with activities as well. This makes them easy to share with students via your learning management system. Selections come with questions. These are simple questions and can be used as a starting point.
Here is a list of eight actions (source) that good readers take during reading. How many items can you check off? And, here are a few strategies to look at:
Repeated Reading Programs (d=0.75) (S)
Can read words in an accurate and quick manner
Vocabulary Programs (d=0.63) (S)
Can connect the meaning of words and sentences
Note-Taking (d=0.51), Concept Mapping (d=0.64) (D)
Outline text and take notes, draw concept maps, create mental images
Reciprocal Teaching (d=0.74) (D)
Rely on clarifying prior knowledge to make sense of words they don’t understand
Make predictions about what’s going to happen or appear next in text
Practice summarization strategies that focus on the relevant, discard the irrelevant
Keep tabs on their own comprehension (or lack thereof) then do something about
Metacognition Strategies (d=0.58) (D)
Engage in metacognitive reflection about what they have read and how well they did
Comb the archive for images, videos, and more to fill slides,
Create reading selections and worksheets,
Discover images and text for document-based questions/learning,
Add a little pizazz to classroom presentations and work
Available in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. You can change languages at the top of every page.
“World Digital Library.” Librarianship Studies & Information Technology. April 19, 2020
Children’s Storybooks Online – This site offers web-based books for young children, older children, and young adult readers. A few have audio provided as well.
SYNC – Sync is a free summer audio book program for teens 13 and up. It begins on April 27, 2017, and goes through the summer. Each week, two complete audio book downloads are made available.
Open eBooks – Students from low-income families can benefit from these free ebooks, but the school needs to sign up first. Then educators from that school can request access codes to share with students. Each student can check out up to 10 ebooks at a time. The Open eBooks app works on iOS and Android devices.
Library of Congress Archive – With more than 150,000 books online, you will definitely want to use the search features to narrow down by topic, collection, creator (author), and/or language.
Reading Resource Project – This program that runs throughout the year provides free books (only shipping is required). Many of the sets include 100 books that can be shipped to you for $88.
Free Kids Books – Choose to read the books either online or download as a PDF to read offline.
Kindle’s Top 100 Free Books – Download and read via the Kindle app or online. Lots of selection choices.
Barnes & Noble’s Popular Free eBooks – Access Barnes & Noble’s list of ebooks that you can download and read on the NOOK app. Be sure to use the sidebar options to narrow search results by subject and age of reader.