Do you ever wonder if your little treasure is actually listening to you?  Do you ever wonder if your friend, family member or partner are listening to you?  Are we loosing our listening skills?  

Often through the day I wonder if my little learners can hear me, genuinely hear me throughout a moment in time, when there are so many sounds and activities happening around them.   Their greatest challenge is auditory discrimination – finding my voice among all the other sounds they hear in that moment in our busy class.  It’s such a steep mountain to climb and can be exhausting for their hard working minds. This is why in grade one, we work on various listening tasks throughout the day.  We often do repeat chants, sound changes in our voices, quiet times, silent contests, controlled noise challenges, we use a visual – the ‘Taco’ metre (Talk – o – Metre – play on words)  and so much more.  Then to help those learners self-regulate, we allow for our ‘focus muffs’ and quiet spaces, our reading tent and separate study areas too.  All of these strategies are self-regulation techniques to help our little learners have success in their day in terms of their listening and focus abilities.    Auditory discrimination is a skill that we often take for granted, but is a developed skill through many, many years of practice.  I am sure you can agree, as adults,  some of us have developed better discrimination listening skills then others!  🙂  Imagine for our little grade one learners, ages 6 and 7- they are ‘newbies’ at this skill, and every one of them work so hard daily at getting better at their listening.  We have to maintain this perspective and keep on helping them to succeed every day.

 

Auditory Discrimination testing does exist if you think this may be a concern for you or your little learner in your life.  Contact your local hearing clinic for more information.

Have a view of this TED Talk and let me know how your listening is going with yourself or the little people in your world.