Montessori Listening Skills For Kids Activity Book

Working on listening skills with kids can feel like playing a broken record. We want our children to be attentive and aware, yet we are not quite sure how to help them listen and truly comprehend. These important skills can be difficult to teach. If we are honest, listening is something we work on our whole lives.

🔊 What Montessori says about listening, silence, and aural training: Maria Montessori placed aural training at the heart of her language arts curriculum from the earliest years. She observed that children who are taught to listen carefully, to distinguish sounds, and to sit in silence develop not only stronger language skills but also greater powers of concentration and self-regulation. The Montessori "Silence Game," in which children practice sitting completely still and silent, is one of the most distinctive and widely replicated Montessori activities. Research on auditory attention (Chun and Turk-Browne, 2007, Annual Review of Psychology) confirms that directed attention training, including activities that require children to focus on specific auditory inputs while filtering out distractions, produces measurable improvements in working memory, reading comprehension, and academic performance. Teaching children to listen is not a soft skill; it is a foundational cognitive capacity.

Five Tips for Teaching Listening Skills to Children

Tip 1

Appreciate Silence

Recent studies have shown immense benefits of silence for the human brain. In a society that is constantly receiving auditory stimulation, silence is more valuable than ever. By allowing times of silence in our homes, we can help build listening skills. Our brains benefit from a break from all the sensory input, especially children's brains. When we embrace silence, we open our ears to hear things we might otherwise not notice.

Tip 2

Repeat Back

This may seem like a small thing, but it is a key tenet of communication skills and one of the most highly valued listening practices. Teaching our children to "tell back" what they have heard helps them listen more carefully. It also helps the speaker confirm that everything has been heard correctly. Asking children to tell back what they have heard during story time is a great way to build this skill. For young children, you may need to have the child tell back every few sentences. As children get older, you can move to every few paragraphs, every few pages, and eventually every chapter. This skill transfers naturally to conversations as well, especially those with details you want to be sure are understood.

Tip 3

Give Your Full Attention

Hearing about a favorite topic for the hundredth time may not be what you are most eager to do, but our children are watching. When we display positive listening skills, our children learn from our example. Taking our eyes off whatever else we are doing to fully engage in conversation is the first step. This demonstrates that we are present and not distracted. One of the top reasons children do not hear what is said is because they are distracted and not actually listening. When we model attentiveness, eye contact, and active listening, we help our children become better listeners and improve communication throughout the home.

Tip 4

Read-Aloud and Audiobooks

Nothing captures a child's attention quite like a story. Sometimes one simply needs to sit in the middle of the room and begin to read aloud. Soon a quiet fills the room and the children are lost in the story. By combining read-alouds with the repeat-back technique above, stories become one of the most powerful tools for building listening skills.

Tip 5

Practice at Home

Home is the best place to practice and build skills. Work on engaging your child in conversations about topics they are interested in. Check out our Listening Activity Pack, which includes over a dozen activities to help build listening skills in the comfort of your own home. You will find the classic Montessori Sitting in Silence activity, crafts, games, and more. Children from preschool all the way through high school can benefit, and parents often find value in a few of the activities as well.

🔊 20+ pages of Montessori-inspired listening activities.

For more tips on engaging your child, refer to the ShillerLearning Parent Guide included with your math kit or at the beginning of each language arts lesson book. You can also browse all our activity packs in the ShillerLearning blog.