Today I’m sharing some more activities for getting kids learning, using their 5 senses. Let’s jump right into it, and I’ll tell you all about these fun sense of sound activities.
9 Fun Sense of Sound Activities
- Marco Polo
- Describe How It Sounds
- Sound Scavenger Hunt
- What Sounds Can You Make
- Sound or No Sound
- Listening Nature Walk
- Telephone
- Sense of Sound Worksheets
- Listing Sound Words
Marco Polo
The game Marco Polo is one your students are sure to enjoy. It gets students using their sense of sound since that is how they find the other students.
How to Play:
Marcus is it, so his teacher, Miss Gibson, blindfolds him. When the playing area is clear of any obstructions, he begins moving around the room, trying to find his other classmates. To get clues where they are, he calls out, “Marco.” The other students must respond with, “Polo” whenever he says it. He hears someone close to him, say “Polo.” He reaches his arm out a bit farther and touches someone. Now he must guess which of his classmates he tagged. Who did that Polo sound like? “Is it Olivia?” he guesses.
Olivia giggles. “Yes, you caught me!”
Marcus slips off the blindfold, so Miss Gibson can put it on Olivia. His sense of sound helped him guess which classmate he caught.
Describe How It Sounds
Give your students practice paying attention to sounds by having them listen to a particular sound and then describe it.
Example:
Miss Gibson has just played a recording of a cat for her students. Now Joey is describing it. He says, “It starts at a higher pitch and then gets lower. It sounds a little bit shrill. It also sounds like it might not be happy.”
Sound Scavenger Hunt
Give your students a list of sounds to listen for. What sounds can they find when they are in their classroom or outside on the playground?
What Sounds Can You Make?
Give your students a variety of items and let them see what sounds they can come up with. Two pencils can become drumsticks, and a table can be the drum. Paper rustles and metal objects make a clanging sound.
Sound Or No Sound?
For this activity, you will need pictures of some various items. Some of the items should be things that make noise, and some of the things should be quiet. You will hold up the pictures and the students will tell whether or not it makes a sound.
List of Sound Items:
Dog, Bird, Car, Firetruck, Violin, Trumpet, Cellphone, Lion, Ocean, Helicopter
List of No Sound Items:
Flower, Book, Cup, House, Sailboat, Butterfly, Tree, Cloud, Backpack, Shoes
Interested in fun sense of sight activities? Check out these 7 activities!
Go on a Listening Nature Walk
Being out in nature is a good time for students to practice listening. Beforehand, you could supply them with a list of things to listen for, like leaves rustling, birds singing, or water running.
Encourage your students to be quiet and pay attention to the sounds around them. As they hear a sound, they should write it down, so at the end, they can see just how many sounds they were able to hear.
Telephone
The game of telephone is another of the fun sense of sound activities. For this game, students sit in a line and one person whispers something in their neighbor’s ear. That student then whispers what they heard into the next student’s ear, and so on down the line. The last person says aloud what they heard, and the first person says what they said. Usually the phrase will have changed. This is a good opportunity to talk about how important sound is and how sounds not heard well can be misinterpreted.
Example:
Laura whispers in Joey’s ear, “My dog’s name is Sandy.” Joey takes what he heard and whispers in Marcus’s ear, “My log’s mane is Sandy.” Then Marcus whispers in Olivia’s ear, “My log’s gain candy.” To the rest of the class, Olivia says, “My lock ate candy.” After Laura says what she originally said, the class has a good laugh about how “My dog’s name is Sandy” became “My lock ate candy.”
Sense of Sound Worksheets
There are also different kinds of worksheets that teach about the sense of sound. Some of them have students sort items based on whether or not they make sound. Others have the students identify whether or not something makes a loud sound or a quiet sound.
In the Poky Little Puppy & the Sense of Sound Activity Guide, the students have fun learning about the sense of sound with this children’s classic story. They will be writing words related to sound and completing a coloring worksheet where they tell if the pictures on the page are loud or quiet.
List of Sound Words
Another of the fun sense of sound activities is to have the children make a list of all the words they can think of relating to sound. The students could work together to make the list, or they could each make their own list. This activity could be turned into a game, with students racing to see who can think of the most words.
Example:
In the Gibson’s schoolroom, Joey and Laura are working together to think of words, and Olivia and Marcus are also on a team together. The two teams have five minutes to think of as many words as they can that relate to the sense of sound. At the end of five minutes, each team reads off their list. Here is Joey and Laura’s list: Loud, quiet, whisper, scream, noisy, shout, rumble, siren, roar, growl, ring, honk, and low. They have 13 words total.
Here is Olivia and Marcus’s list: quiet, soft, loud, high-pitched, screech, scream, squeal, rustle, clap, noisy, yell, whisper, bang, whistle, and yelp. They have 15 words, so they win the race.
Conclusion:
Teaching children about the sense of sound will show them how important listening is. And these fun sense of sound activities will make listening enjoyable for them as they learn to listen to all that goes on around them.
How about you? Do you have some fun listening activities that your students enjoy? Please share them with us! And let me know which of these ideas you plan to share with your students.
