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Planning a Listening Lesson - 3rd Grade

Hey there!


With one of my classes, Teaching English Language Skills I, we were supposed to plan a listening lesson for an imaginary group of students (since we're still students, we don't have real students. Hehe.).

We really put effort on our listening lesson plan so I will be explaining it to you a bit, don't hesitate to share your comments with me.

We’ve prepared this lesson plan with one of my classmates, Ufuk. The language work we chose is about school classroom items. The reason why we chose this topic is that we wanted to pick a topic that relates to the students, we wanted them to acquire the vocabulary that they will be able to use in their daily lives, as well. Our imaginary class consists of a total of 24 students in 3rd grade who are studying in a public school. There are 14 female and 10 male students aged 9 to 10. Their proficiency level is A1, so we planned a simple, fun, and educational lesson plan for them.

We have six objectives as you can see. Yet, I will only be mentioning a few of them.

Our first objective is ‘’Students will be able to participate in pair conversation and classroom discussion using their current vocabulary.’’ This one is the objective of our pre-task activity. Before continuing with the while task, we wanted students to warm up a bit, activating their current vocabulary. For example, let’s say Pair A knows the word ‘’Pencil’’ and tells pair B, ‘’I guess you have a pencil in your bag’’. So that pair a, who doesn’t know the word ‘’pencil’’ will hear its pronunciation and they will negotiate the meaning together. This is also a listening activity for the learners, but because they’re doing this activity with a friend, they won’t feel like they’re practicing something.

Our fifth objective is ‘’Students will be able to write down the information obtained from the listening activity.’’ We think it’s essential for a teacher to see if their learners can listen to something and make sense of what they hear to put it down on paper. In this way, students will also have a chance to practice the vocabulary items they have learned in the previous task.

Our sixth objective is ‘’Students will be able to use the affirmative and negative forms of the verb ’to have’ to define what they have or do not have in their bags.’’. The song they listen to in the while task includes patterns like ‘’You don’t have a pet snake’’, so they hear these patterns along with the vocabulary items. While teaching classroom items, we thought that it would be useful to introduce the verb ‘’to have’’ to make it easier for them to talk about what classroom items they have.

So our pre-listening task takes 15 minutes to complete. It includes student to student interaction. The teacher starts the lesson after a quick small talk session. The teacher asks students to make pairs with their desk mates and have a discussion on guessing what might be in each other’s bags. Then they show each other what they have and check if their guesses are correct. Meanwhile, the teacher stays silent and monitors the classroom. After the pair discussion ends, the teacher asks the pairs to tell the classroom what was the most interesting thing they saw in their friend’s bag. This activity aims to activate the current vocabulary by making them play a guessing game and at the same time since our class is a young learners’ classroom, we’re making use of gamification to make them more engaged in the upcoming activities.


Our while listening task takes 20 minutes to complete. It both includes teacher to student interaction and student to student interaction. The teacher starts with distributing the ‘’fill in the blanks’’ worksheet. Then the teacher tells students to listen to the song and fill in the blanks with the words they hear.

This is our worksheet. We prepared something colorful and put some icons of the vocabulary items that the learners are about to learn. We made our instruction short and simple to be clear and less intimidating as possible.

After the listening part ends, the teacher tells students to exchange their worksheets with their desk mates for pair check and shows the answer key via projection.


Our post-listening task takes 15 minutes to complete. It includes teacher to student interaction. After the while task ends and Students see the vocabulary, A worksheet with three different keywords in addition to the words learned in the previous activity is distributed by the teacher. Students are expected to write 8 sentences using the keywords and the affirmative and negative forms of the verb to have. This activity aims to reinforce the information they learned during the while task and see if they can put this information on paper. The number of words to be taught at one time in English teaching to young children should be limited. Therefore, we set ourselves a limit of 8 for the words we aim to teach students. Besides, we have included a controlled practice in this worksheet so that they can start learning patterns such as "I have x in my bag", " You don't have x in your bag ", which they heard an example of in the song they listen to during the while-task. . We also gave them an example sentence so that they can simply express whether the items in the words above are in their bags. We put the photographs of the three words they did not know on the worksheet as pictures under the worksheet so that they could be a clue for them.


You can reach the plan we prepared by downloading the file below. I made all of the handouts you see in the file using Canva.




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