Auditory Reading Lesson Plans
Reading Activities for Auditory-Sequential Learners
Traditional auditory-sequential curricula and reading activities appeal to kids who prefer organized, language based instruction.
All students have preferred learning styles, and these styles should be taken into account when teaching phonemic and phonetic skills to new readers. Although much has been made about how a disproportionate number of traditional classroom activities revolve around auditory-sequential learners, it would be a mistake to ignore these activities altogether. Thus, auditory-sequential activities should be used along with kinesthetic-tactile and visual-spatial lessons in order to reach more children.
Telephone Games
Although auditory sequential children learn much through listening, this type of student may also enjoy sharing what he or she knows. Make the learning more fun by using a play telephone.
- Make a "telephone" using two small funnels attached to several feet of narrow rubber or plastic pipe.
- To encourage phonemic learning, have two students share rhymes one at a time through the telephone.
- In another variation, have one student say or spell a word aloud through the telephone while his or her partner records first or last letter sounds or spells out the actual words.
- More advanced readers may enjoy sharing a story on the telephone. Students can alternate reading lines of a favorite story or poem to a partner who shares in the experience.
Make Noise!
- Auditory Sequential learners may benefit from learning presented through a rhythmic chant or song.
- "Uh, umbrella... u, uh, umbrella!" (chant this or other silly rhythms to illustrate vowel sounds while students keep time with shakers or small instruments)
- "A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y... A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y... Oh these are all the vowels, these are all the vowels, A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y" (to the tune of She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain)
- Special bonus: Add hand movements to the rhythms or songs, and you'll keep your kinesthetic learners better engaged, and your Visual Spatial learners may remember the event better by seeing the movement along with the song!
Read Aloud and Read Often
- While nearly all children benefit from listening to stories, auditory-sequential children will have the ability to remember details and sequencing better than their kinesthetic-tactile and visual-spatial classmates. Thus, auditory-sequential students may begin to learn higher level reading skills (comprehension, main idea, characterization) even as they are learning to read. Audio stories with read-along books are especially useful for teaching auditory –sequential students to read.
There’s Nothing Wrong with Tradition
- Auditory-Sequential learners do quite well when offered clear phonemic and phonetic instructions, so traditional sequential reading strategies may actually work best for these students.
- Worksheets offering young students the ability to write the letters and sounds that they are hearing are often effective for auditory-sequential children who think in words. For these learners, the very act of writing letters and words is an act of processing and organizing ideas.
Creating lesson plans that appeal to a variety of learning styles ensures that all reading students have access to the literary world. The auditory-sequential learner has the benefit of learning in the traditional classroom but may also benefit from tried and true reading strategies for kinesthetic-tactile and visual-spatial students.
