Language Arts

Listening skills are an important part of language arts. Active listening can help students to reinforce aural comprehension.

  • Teach active listening skills to help students focus on main points, restate, and listen for feelings, as well as facts.
  • Use listening skill activities as warm-ups before reading a story out loud or presenting a lesson.
  • Ask students to restate what characters are expressing in a story.
  • Pair students up and have one student tell about a conflict he/she has had while the other student listens for three minutes. Then have the other person restate what he/she hear. The students can reverse roles.

Speaking skills are another essential part of language arts. In everyday interactions with others it is important to be able to identify and express feelings. For most students this is difficult as they have a limited feeling word vocabulary. Developing this vocabulary and their ability to identify feelings can increase their ability to empathize with the characters about whom they read.

  • Provide activities that will increase the students feelings vocabulary and will help them to identify feelings.
  • Brainstorm feeling words and put them on a web.
  • Have students tell about a time when they felt a certain feeling.
  • Have students identify how characters in a story are feeling.
  • Have students write about feelings or use feeling words in a story.?
  • Teach students how to organize their thoughts, feelings and needs and state them in a clear concise way.

Reading provides many opportunities to analyze conflict situations

• What effect did the conflict have on people involved?

• What choices/options were available?

• What would you have done in this situation? See Literature Helps to Teach Conflict Management.

Developed with contributions from Vinia Roberts, Parklayne Elementary, New Carlisle, Ohio and Martha Green, PLOUGHSHARES, Glenford, Ohio 614-659-2322.

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