Weekly 5: Podcasts for Students!

Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular by teachers in classrooms for literacy use. You can build skills such as main idea, providing evidence, cause/effect, and so on. For language students, the added task of listening is a bonus with podcasts! 

If you’re home right now – listening to podcasts with your kids or as a language student is an excellent (and educational) use of your time!

Here are 5 podcasts: 2 elementary, 2 secondary, & 1 specifically for ESL. 

Elementary Podcasts

Pants on Fire

Can you spot the liar? Each show focuses on one topic, in which a child asks two “experts” questions. Based on their answers, the child tries to decide who is telling the truth & who is lying. It’s a great way to have your kids learn about good evidence and details verses opinion or fake information. The end of the show goes over some of the answers from each expert and why they were bad or good. 

Activity Idea: create further questions to ask the experts

Forever Ago

Have you ever wondered how skateboards or tennis shoes were first invented and created? Every episode explores the creation of one thing: clocks, shoes, video games, sandwiches. 

Activity Idea: Create an item based on the topic. Create and draw a new sandwich or pair of shoes! 

Secondary Podcasts

#herstory

This podcast isn’t necessarily geared towards secondary students, but it is appropriate & very interesting for biography. There are 50 episodes, all featuring a woman’s story told by women. They are inspiring, incredible stories that we don’t often hear as part of history.

Activity Idea: Biography writing, research an individual, or fill-in this graphic organizer I created for biography while listening! Take a peek here:

The Radio Adventures of Eleanor Amplified

This is a very popular podcast used by many tweens/teens. It would be great for middle school and high school students. This is an adventure series great for the whole family! Produced by NPR, it’s a very well done & sparks great discussion topics. 

Activity Idea: have a discussion or write about values & whether you agree with Eleanor’s views or not

Podcasts for English Language Learners

A great website that links to various podcasts and listening texts for ESL is: podcastinenglish.com It is great because it offers podcasts for beginning levels and up.

Personally, I live Voice of American Learning English

Great listening tasks on many different topics!

BONUS Podcast

The Allusionist

For Language lovers! Each episode is on a different topic focused on grammar, puns, idioms, lyrics, word-games, & more. It’s simply described as “A podcast about language”. As someone who enjoys word games, vocab, & grammar, I find this podcast interesting & fun.

Hope these podcasts are helpful for you either personally or learning!

Happy Teaching (& listening)!