Skilled active listeners are also more self-reliant and confident, allowing them to interpret aural stimulus more easily. While they might not be conscious of this, the confidence-boost makes a difference in the conduct of the very young children in your classroom. Promoting active listening in your classroom is therefore one of the best ways to holistically support your class in becoming 21st century ready, with a soft-skill that will be useful across all subjects and scenarios. We share three ways educational toys can help you do this:
Help them practice mindfulness
Active listening is more than about paying attention to people speaking. It’s also about your ability to pay attention to the environment in a general way and make deductions about how this affects your conduct in the space. This includes people’s body language. Miniland’s Mindful Kids program is a set of 36 activities that help your class develop and maintain states of focused, non-judgemental awareness.
Easily suited to cross-curricular lessons, spending just twenty minutes per day on this series of yoga, breathing, meditation, and relaxation exercises will give your children a firm foundation in the state of mind best suited to active listening, without neglecting the demands of the official curriculum.
Promote creative collaboration
Working together as a community relies on our ability to communicate. While creative collaboration is demanding on mindfulness and active listening skills, it’s also one of the keys to social innovation in the 21st century. Without it, we would never be able to make ideas a reality and effect social progress. Giving your class plenty of opportunities to practice creating something together in a safe and fun environment is the only way they’ll get better at this essential and transferable skill. Miniland’s Dictate & Shape is the perfect tool to make this happen. To learn more about this visual dictation game, take a look at our video:
Build a vocabulary and use it together
Opportunities to build a collective, potentially multilingual, vocabulary abound with Miniland’s ABC Monster. This is the perfect opportunity for your class to apply the skills they’ve learned with Mindful Kids and Dictate & Shape — drawing inspiration from a visual image to take turns to “feed the monster” and build any word from the Latin Alphabet. In addition to the conventional literacy-building this game supports, they’ll also get plenty of practice at listening to each other, and learn quickly (if subconsciously) that by actively listening to the people around them they can be more successful.
Setting your children up for success in the 21st century can be as simple as providing plenty of opportunities to play games, in a well-facilitated environment. As specialty toymakers, we’ve dedicated our lives to making this possible. Begin your journey with Mindful Kids, or take a look at our catalog to put together a combination perfectly suited to your needs.
