As you know, audiobooks are a great tool for helping your struggling readers with fluency. But there are so many other ways you can use audiobooks in the classroom! Read-along audiobooks are just another unique way to help engage your students to help improve their comprehension, listening, and thinking skills!
Push play on any audiobook and use these activities with your whole class or in small groups.
Use Audiobooks to Build Comprehension Skills
- Pause the audio and have a few students reenact the last scene.
- Pause the audio and have students draw a picture of the last sentence they heard.
- At the end of the story or chapter, have students write a summary or timeline.
- Ask students to write down any words that they don’t know the meaning of as they listen. At the end of the story, have them write the sentence that the word is found in. Then, have them look the word up in a dictionary and write the definition under the sentence. Finally, have the student re-write the sentence from the story, but in their own words, showing that they understand what the word means in that context.
Not sure how to use audiobooks in your classroom? Read this!
Use Audiobooks to Improve Listening Skills
For these activities, put the book aside and simply use the audio.
- Challenge students to write all of the adjectives, adverbs, nouns, etc. they hear. This will reinforce their listening and vocabulary skills. Or ask students to keep a tally of specific sight words they hear: the – 8, there – 3, when – 5.
- Create a cloze reading worksheet from a portion of the audiobook. As students listen to the audio, they should fill in the missing words on the cloze activity.
- Play a portion of an audiobook where the author is describing a character or a room. After listening, have students draw the character or room. Did they catch all the details?
- Turn the listening experience into a math problem. Every time a number is read, ask students to write it down. At the end of the story, add up the numbers. If everyone was listening, all the totals should be the same.
- Use the audio as an art project. Have students listen for colors. If they hear the word “purple” they should begin coloring with a purple crayon. If the color “green” is read, they should begin coloring with the green crayon.
Use Audiobooks to Improve Thinking Skills
Get students thinking and making inferences by pausing the audio and asking them:
- What do you think will happen next?
- What if…? (Encourage students to think ahead by asking “what if” questions.)
- What would you do?
- Where should the character go next?
- Would you have done something different? How would you respond in that situation? (Ask students to reflect on questions like this.)
- Can you solve the mystery?
Get your hands on high-interest / low-readability read-along audiobooks here!
