Here are some activities for small and large groups to practice active listening skills.
- What’s your passion?
- Pair up the students
- Have each student spend 3 minutes discussing a hobby or passion. The other student should be listening and might want to take notes.
- After 3 minutes, have the students switch partners and repeat the activity.
- Each student will then share with the class the information they obtained from the interview.
- What’s my job?
- Pair up the students
- Give one student a job title with a job description.
- The student with the job title and job description will start the conversation by providing a clue about the job, for example, “I sit at a desk most of the day.”
- The second student will then ask a related question. “Do you have a computer at your desk?“
- This back and forth exchange will continue until the job is guessed.
- Change the news.
- Divide the class into two groups and tell the students that you will be reading a news article out loud to them.
- Read the article exactly as it is written
- Tell the students that you will be rereading the article, but will be changing some of the information
- Tell the students to raise their hands when they hear something that differs from the first reading
- The team that identifies the most changes – wins
- Continue the story.
- Run the activity as a whole group
- The first person will start a story with one sentence.
- The next person must add a sentence, but it must start with the last word.
- The process continues until each student has a turn.
Example:
Student 1: “A long time ago we didn’t have cars.”
Student 2: “Cars were needed for transportation to and from towns.”
Student 3: “Towns were far apart from each other.”
Modification:
If you have a large group, you can modify the activity by having each person add one word, instead of a whole sentence.
