Description

We have created this Active Listening: Podcasts resource to support teachers to use podcasts in their classrooms. It’s great to listen to podcasts, but to keep students engaged, they also need a purpose for listening. Our Active Listening resource can give students that purpose.

In the set of Active Listening: Podcast Task Cards, the focus is Aotearoa New Zealand history.

Each podcast episode in this resource has two task cards associated with it.

The first task card asks students to take notes and summarise as they listen. This involves sketch-noting, finding key ideas and writing a one-two sentence summary.
- We have provided a working model of this skill that can be taught and modelled to students.
The second task card has six comprehension questions for students to answer while, or after, listening. These questions are designed to correspond to the content in the podcast and reinforce the main messages of the podcast.
- The questions cover many aspects of comprehension including summarising, making connections, questioning, evaluating and visualising, as well as some vocabulary activities and creative tasks.

Why Practice Active Listening?

Research tells us that better listeners are better readers. Reading is a function of two key components: decoding and language comprehension. Listening is a key part of language comprehension. In the Science of Reading, the awareness of sounds that make up spoken words is critical. Listening to stories helps students hear grammar and syntax and understand how stories work. Incidental exposure to vocabulary through listening together helps students learn the meaning of unknown words.

The Aotearoa History Show: Season One – Radio New Zealand with support from NZ On Air

This podcast is the story of New Zealand and its people from its geological origins to the modern-day. The episodes can be listened to as audio-only, or watched with the addition of animations to provide visual cues to support the content. This podcast is supported by the Ministry of Education, with Season Two being fully released by the end of term three, 2022.

This podcast supports all four of the contexts of the Aotearoa NZ Histories curriculum, including