Giving learners opportunities to practise their speaking and listening skills isn’t just for English lessons! Here are some quick and easy ideas to help primary and lower secondary teachers bring speaking and listening into their maths and science lessons as well.
1. Get talking
Any time your learners are working together, they are developing their speaking and listening skills. Try and include opportunities for learners to discuss a topic in groups, explain their prediction to a partner or talk through how they have approached a maths problem.
2. Tell me what you found
Science provides your learners with a great way to practise their presenting skills. Ask learners to talk the class through an experiment, explaining how they ensured a fair test, or how they gathered and analysed the data. They’ll also be developing the skills for thinking and working scientifically!
3. Give instructions
Providing opportunities for learners to try different types of speaking – such as presenting, debating and giving instructions – is important. Help them practise giving instructions with this simple activity. Put learners into pairs and set them a task related to your topic or theme. As an example, you could ask them to build an electric circuit or create a house using 2D shapes. Can they complete the task?
4. Let’s play!
Give your learners a bingo card with topic-specific vocabulary at the beginning of the lesson. They must listen throughout the class, ticking off words on their card as they hear them – whoever fills their card quickest, wins!
5. Which word?
Here’s another idea which will also help with their vocabulary. Give each child a set of word cards, each related to your topic, for example, if your lesson is on 3D shapes, you could use:
- Edge
- Face
- Vertex
- Vertices
- Curved surface
Let them know you’ll be explaining what these words mean throughout the lesson so they’ll need to listen very hard. During the class, pause the lesson to give a definition and ask the class to hold up the card they think matches it. You can make this a bit harder by leaving more of a gap between the definition and the question.
How did you get on? If you enjoyed these speaking and listening tips and wanted more support with the Cambridge Primary and Lower Secondary series, you can browse our selection of teacher and learner books here.
