Rhyme Robber: the game that helps children improve their listening skills

Today I'm going to tell you about one of my favorite board games: Rhyme Robber.It's produced by Orchard Toys, the British company I mentioned in a previous post,  and it's a perfect filler for these last hot days of school.

The most remarkable ESL purpose of this game is to develop listening skills at a very young age through sound recognition and rhyming skills, which, as I already wrote here, are crucial in order to build effective communication skills as adults.

In the game box you'll find 4 rhyme robber boards showing a child with a robber's swag bag (1 for each player), 48 rhyme cards and a rhyme guide board, where all the pictures and their respective words are grouped by rhyming sounds and colors.

Each player is given two cards, which they hold in their hands without showing to anybody else, then 4 more cards are placed face up in the centre of the table, while the rest of the cards are left face down in a pile next to these.

The youngest player starts and if they are holding a card that rhymes with one of the four cards in the centre of the table, then they can take the matching card while saying, for example, 'rake rhymes with lake', and put both cards face up on top of their robber board in their character's swag bag. If the next player has in their hand a card that matches a card on another player's board, they can choose to take that one, instead of one from the centre of the table. In any case once a player puts down a card, they have to take another one from the pile so that they are always holding two cards. The game ends  when all 48 cards have been stolen or no more cards can be stolen.
 
The game is especially effective with preschoolers and first graders straight out of the box: you'll only have to be there to read the names under the pictures out loud to help children recognize the rhyming sounds. Very small kids won't love the fact that other players can steal their cards so I'd suggest not insisting that they follow that rule, especially since we should focus on the development of listening skills more than anything else.
 
Once I noticed that older kids have stronger rhyming skills I suggested an extension of the game: through reading rhyming books I encouraged my students to look for new rhyming word families which they would then copy onto paper, cut out in circles, and added to the basic game in order to make it last longer.

My students' favorite books are ones written by Dr Seuss, the author of Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, The Lorax, Horton Hears a Who! and many more, as well as others by Julia Donaldson such as The Gruffalo, What the Ladybird Heard, Room on the Broom, The Snail and the Whale,  A Squash and a Squeeze among others.

Click on the links to Orchard Toys, Seussville and Julia Donaldson websites to entertain your childish soul as much as it needs :)

--> Quiero leer esta entrada en castellano

              

    



  
 

The (not-so-secret) secret behind our listening skills.

One day, several months ago, I was about to start one of my classes when my student's father asked me what he could do to improve his own listening skills, since every time he watched a movie he had trouble understanding the dialogues.

It was actually an interesting question as the attempt to improve Spaniards' speaking and listening skills has brought to this country a horde of native speakers from all over the world to this country; in fact, this man was actually taking classes himself - however, it clearly didn't seem to be enough.

My experience with children with reading and writing difficulties has lead me to one simple conclusion that might explain this issue: there is a gap between how the listener pronounces a word and the correct pronunciation of that same word.

The causes of this gap might vary according to individual learning experiences but, to keep it extremely simple, most of the issue could be solved just by checking how to pronounce the word in an online dictionary. This theory might sound like the egg of Columbus to you, but for many people it is definitely not so obvious.

We are so often in a hurry and have so many other things to do, that we don't dedicate enough time to the details of a language, supposing, of course, that in the fantastic world of ESL, where grammar rules the roost, listening comprehension could be considered a detail (which it definitely is).

As an example of what I'm saying here, take the word 'procedure' - pronounced /prəˈsiːdʒə(r)/ - which is a totally latin-root word that in Spanish is translated as 'procedimiento'.

Now imagine you have some maths and language homework awaiting on your desk, besides your English homework, of course, or you have to go and pick up the children from school etc.; so now you're there,  doing your English exercises, reading that word in your mind, as quickly as possible, and BANG! Before you know it, your brain begins to play a trick on you!

How? The first part of the word  'procedure' coincides with its Spanish translation procedimiento, right? So in your mind, it should be pronounced /prɔːsiː/,  /prɒθe/ or /prɒse/ while the second part of 'procedure' should sound like 'during' /djʊər/... There you go! The die is cast! From now on the word procedure will be recognised by your brain only when pronounced  /prɔː siːdjʊər/,  instead of /prəˈsiːdʒə(r)/, which, basically, means that you'll never recognized that word!

This example can be applied to any word and the consequences are important, because it is a circular process. Now imagine you're a student who has a couple of pages to study. You read them, trying to guess how to correctly pronounce the words you don't know, which are probably the key words you must learn to pass your exam. The next day you go to school and your teacher and classmates start to pronounce those words correctly. You don't recognize them and after a while, you're lost, and, even worse, you've practically wasted an hour of English class. Then the day of the exam arrives and part of it includes in a listening test but, since you don't recognize the key words, you fail it. Sad, isn't it? But definitely more common than we think.

What's the solution? When speaking English in class all the time doesn't help because there are always children (or adults) without a "good ear for sounds", we should focus on teaching sounds, enabling our students to first recognize them, and then to reproduce them correctly. Starting with phonemes, followed by words, phrases, sentences, texts and then books.

What I do during my classes is to listen to the children reading, without following the text on the page. This way when I don't understand what they are saying, because they're mispronouncing words,  I can stop them, read the passage correctly and make them repeat it. Unfortunately, the fact is that many teachers get used to Spanish mispronunciation or simply avoid correcting the speakers, especially when dealing with adults (who are more difficult to correct because their brain is already fully developed), which leads straight to the frustration of that parent I mentioned above.

In general, it is possible to work autonomously and improve our listening skills by ourselves, but it requires more effort and time than most of people are willing to dedicate to it. There are plenty of books (called readers) and magazines which come with audio files, so that anybody can check how to pronounce every single word, as well as most films and series which now are available in their original language with  subtitles. The secret is to start from the easy ones, increase the difficulty little by little, and rehearse pronunciation out loud, until we can understand almost the entire audio file without reading along.

But first, the sounds of English!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pron/sounds/

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My favourite graded readers are edited by Cideb. Their Green Apple collection is especially designed for young learners and teenagers to help them prepare official exams such as KET, PET, Trinity, etc.

           











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Related Posts:

Phonemic Awareness

Flashcards Games

On Reading Comprehension

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My blog in Spanish

YES magazine - An entertaining way to prepare Cambridge exams (B2, C1, C2)

This year I have started CAE preparation (Certificate of Advanced English, level C1) for my 14 year-old genius of a student.

At the beginning of September I was snooping around the bookshop to see if I could find some material which would be appropriate or him, because, even though he's brilliant, he is still only 14, and let's face it, the books on offer for CAE preparation are not exactly what I would call entertaining. 

Of course, I was quickly starting to realise there weren't any decent options to choose from, at least not among course books, when, all of a sudden, it appeared!
Right next to the cash register, with a headline screaming SPORTS… I knew it was the one! So I bought it, right after taking a quick peek inside.

"YES" is halfway between a magazine and an English supplement for people with a good level of English.

According to the people at Cambridge the most effective way to prepare for the reading test is, (what a surprise!) to read a wide range of texts. This should include magazines, articles from newspapers, and online materials on a wide range of topics. So what could be better than reading and answering questions about an article or two, especially since people generally don't like reading so much?

Inside each issue of "YES" you'll find section about current affairs, sports news, language news, science, technology and politics, as well as a dossier about the main topic and an entire section specifically designed to introduce grammar and new vocabulary.

Once you buy "YES", you have the option of downloading a folder full of audio files whose transcriptions are included in the magazine. In my opinion, they really help with preparation for the listening part of the CAE exam thanks to the variety of English accents you'll hear. As we all know, even though English is just one language, there are quite a few differences in the way people pronounce it. But not only that; there are also differences in the spelling and in the vocabulary, depending on which country the speakers come from: a variety that a candidate will definitely have to deal with during the exam.

In addition, throughout  the whole magazine, there are footnotes which explain difficult vocabulary, giving definitions in English or using pictures and, in the section at the back,  you'll find 20 pages of exercises and games to test and consolidate what you've been studying.

So, if you are looking for something a bit different to your typical course book, don't miss "YES"! Here you can find all the information you could possibly need.

---> Quiero leer este post en español

Lucy dedicates a lot of time and love to thinking about and writing the posts she shares with all of you. Because she believes that a better teaching is the key for a better future. If you find any help, value or joy in this blog, please consider becoming a supporting reader. A donation, in any amount, will be gratefully accepted.