Active listening, which includes eye contact, appropriate body position and language, and the acts of asking questions, summarizing, and not interrupting, is an essential skill for making new friends, understanding information, and communicating effectively.
Whether students are building relationships with friends or learning a new concept from teachers, they must engage in good listening in order to be successful. In fact, the benefits of active listening extend beyond the classroom, and is a quality many employers seek when interviewing candidates.
These fun and simple active listening exercises invite students to consider the actions and impact of focusing on what is being said and sharing feelings about being truly heard.
In this episode of Happy Healthy Kids, Miss Kelsey encourages kids to explain how they feel to their grown-ups. Watch a clip from Arthur and see how sharing his feelings make him feel better.
What's the word on the street? Murray introduces the vocabulary word "conflict." This video helps young students understand how to use verbal and nonverbal cues to avoid conflict and how to problem-solve.
This activity is designed to be taught at the beginning of the year and re-visited throughout the first half of the school year as needed. The goal is to help students learn how to speak and listen to each other. There are 6 posters included with this lesson and you will go over each poster and discuss what an active listener is then practice the different varations of sharing and pairing.
Poster Titles
This alignment results from the ALEX Health/PE COS Resource Alignment Summit.
With so much emphasis placed on improvements in math and science, skills like compassion often receive less classroom time. This unintended trade-off may be short-sighted, as compassion is an important social-emotional skill that begins to develop in early childhood and is essential for lifelong health and success. Learning compassion increases students’ own sense of well-being and improves the learning environment for all learners. By teaching kindness, empathy and compassion in the classroom, educators set their students up for long term success in every aspect of life.
This free video resource from PBS LearningMedia teaches students the importance of communicating while playing sports. Playing outside makes kids happier, healthier and stronger! In this segment, Abby Brown visits a softball practice and discovers constant communication is a crucial part of working together as a team in order to succeed.