Do You Hear What I Hear? — Tips for Building Listening Skills in Pre-Readers
So much emphasis is put on the visual aspect of the alphabet that we sometimes forget the critical auditory aspect of reading. The alphabet, after all, is a set of symbols for sounds—the sounds that we put into various combinations and recognize as words. So, in order to decode written words, a child must be able to match the sound of a letter to the sounds in the words.
Even this task is more complicated than it first appears. First, a child must notice the sounds of a word. Then, they must be able to give careful, close attention to them. Then, they must be able to isolate the individual sounds within the word, and, finally, distinguish each individual sound from the different ones around it. No wonder learning to read is such hard work!
Fortunately, there are activities and games that you can implement with your little one to build these critical listening skills. You might even notice that it pays off in more than just the pre-reading department!
Noticing and Naming Sounds
Pause to notice and point out the sounds in many different places:
Your home,
The grocery store,
A city street,
A garden,
The playground.
When you do so, try one or more of these activities:
1. Sound words are a veritable gold mine of onomatopoeia (words like “pop” that sound like what they mean). Kids love this! Build your child’s vocabulary by applying as many labels (adjectives) to the sounds as you can think of. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
soft
blaring
loud
humming
quiet
banging
tapping
musical
rushing
crunching
trickling
barking
2. Find opposite pairs of sounds: a near one and a far one, a quiet one and a loud one. What would be the opposite of a buzzing sound? There’s no right answer! Ask your child what they think it would be and if they can find one.
3. Have a sound scavenger hunt. Make a list or a BINGO-style gameboard before you head out and see (or hear) what you can find! You might try including some difficult, or less frequently found sounds and keep the search going over multiple outings. How about:
A churchbell
A train horn
A cow mooing
A motorboat
A crow cawing
Paying Close Attention to Sounds
We have all experienced the difference between just hearing something and really listening to it. Close listening is an important skill for both pre-reading and reading comprehension. It involves sustained focus and thinking about what we are listening to.
This active listening is the skill that will help your little one distinguish between the subtleties of B and P consonant sounds or the short E and short I sounds. Here are a few tips to activate close listening in your child.
Give clear and consistent signals when you need your child to actively listen, like when you are giving instructions or asking for a behavior change.
Kneel down on their level.
Make sure you have their full attention. Ask them to pause playing for a moment and listen to you.
Make eye contact while talking even if your child doesn’t always meet your gaze in return.
Play listening games like:
Mother, May I,
Simon Says,
Red Light, Green Light,
Musical Chairs, or
Telephone.
Incorporate narration into your reading time. Read your child a short narrative story, and then ask your child to tell you what happened in it. The goal, over time, is for your child to relate the events of the story back to you in their own words and in the order that they happened. Ask prompting questions and offer help where needed. “What happened after the three little pigs built the brick house?”
Isolating Individual Sounds
The goal of sound isolation is to be able to identify a single sound from among others—either other sounds happening at the same time or other sounds that happen shortly before or after. Here are some ideas to help your child practice:
Listen to music and try to identify the different instruments. Listen just for the drums, then just for the tambourine, then just for the piano. Listen to the background singers and then the lead singer.
Play phonemic awareness activities like asking your child to isolate the first sound of a word. This is called segmenting, and there are many ways to do this depending on your child’s skill level. If they know the consonant sounds, ask them to identify the first letter of a word. “What is the first letter in the word pig?” If they have not yet mastered the consonant sounds, just ask them for the first sound in the word. NOTE: Lots of practice and modeling is to be expected with this activity. “What is the first sound we hear in the word p-p-p-pig?”
Distinguishing Between Different Sounds
Even after your child is a pro at noticing, naming, paying attention to, and isolating sounds, it will take time and experience to distinguish between different ones. Distinguishing is the act of comparing and knowing how one sound differs from another similar sound. This skill will be crucial for decoding those tricky Bs and Ps we talked about earlier. Here are some tips:
Make sure you are pronouncing words correctly whenever possible. If your child has difficulty pronouncing consonant sounds or correctly segmenting the first sound of a word, prompt them to watch your lips as you make the sound.
Play a sound memory game. Set out several things on the table that make different noises: a shaker, a toy drum, a bell, a horn, etc. Let your child experiment with all of them so that they are very familiar with their sounds. Then, ask your child to close their eyes and listen. Make three different sounds in a row. Next, ask your child to open their eyes and repeat the sequence. Take turns and close your eyes while your child makes a sequence for you to imitate! Make it more challenging by:
Adding more sound options
Adding more sounds to the sequence
Repeating sounds within the same sequence
Play sound guessing games that require experience and familiarity. Again, taking turns makes everything more fun!
Using a toy piano or xylophone, have your child close their eyes and hit a note. Then, have your child try to locate which one you played.
Eyes closed again! Make a sound with a familiar object in the room. Set the remote on the table. Lock the door. Toss the dog’s toy. See if your child can name what you did.
Here’s one to play in the tub or at the kitchen sink! See who can pour water the closest to the brim of a cup (with eyes closed) without spilling over.
These activities are more advanced because they require your child to have a bank of sound experiences to draw from as they compare one sound to another: a low note with a high one, a mostly empty cup with a mostly full one.
It may not feel like teaching reading, but it is! Written language was developed from our spoken one, so it makes sense that speaking and listening are foundational skills to reading.
For more tips, activities, and structured support in preparing your child to read and write, check out Tenblox — the program that builds your child’s literacy foundation one skill block at a time.