Nonfiction Listening Center Books for Kindergarten

Published: November 14, 2021
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Listening center books for kindergarten about fun nonfiction topics. Plus. listening center response activities and QR codes for each book.

Listening Center Books for Kindergarten

Having a listening center for students to explore books in kindergarten is a must! This is where students can discover and listen to stories that are above their reading level. It is also a great time for kindergarten students to practice working independently. I always include a listening center during my literacy station time.

Listening centers can be completed with different types of text. You may include seasonal books throughout the year to celebrate specific holidays. These are always fun for students. You can also use your listening station as a place to learn new information. Nonfiction texts are great to use in the literacy center. Or, you may just have fun books or traditional stories that you know your students will love. What’s best is use them all! Switch it up from time to time and keep the listening center an interesting place for students to explore books.

Nonfiction Listening Center Books

I love adding nonfiction texts to the listening center! Kindergarteners (and first graders, too) love learning about new things! When I add a nonfiction book, I know they are not only enjoying hearing the text, but they are excited to show that they learned something new. This set of nonfiction books is perfect! It uses National Geographic Kids Explore My World titles and they match up with kindergarten and first grade learning quite well. From weather, to planets, to rainforests, and all about several different animals… students get pretty excited about the pictures and information in these texts. There are 14 titles included in the growing listening center bundle!

I am all about using a hard copy of literature if you have it. I love that students can feel and turn the pages. However, you can only have so many books… right? Especially listening center books with a CD. I love Scholastic, but they don’t always offer exactly what I am looking for. So to solve the problem, I included a recorded video of each nonfiction book. If you have the text, great! Use it in addition to the recording. If you don’t, no sweat! Students can see the pictures and hear the words of the book by simply scanning a QR code on the printable student response sheets.

The QR code is not linked to YouTube. No need to worry about ads and unwanted information for your students. The QR code will take students to a recorded video and audio of the book – nothing else!

After scanning the QR code and listening to the recorded book, students complete a listening center response sheet. There are 3-5 printable activities for each book. You can select which one you want students to work on during center time, or provide all of the options and promote student choice.

In addition to responding to the nonfiction text, there are also ELA skill practice printables.

Depending on how much time students spend at literacy centers, you may have them listen to the story and complete a written response, and then also complete a word work activity. Or perhaps they end up at the listening center twice a week… if that is the case they could complete a written response the first time and then ELA practice the second time.

These nonfiction listening center books for kindergarten are a great way to provide nonfiction texts for your students to explore! If you are a first grade teacher, these book activities would work well in your classroom, too!

As I said earlier, I love adding different types of literature to the listening center for kindergarten. They seriously love the Click Clack books my Doreen Cronin and the books are great to add in during the holidays! These listening center activities do not have QR codes, but it is a little easier to find these books on cd. And of course, you can also read the text aloud and complete the activities in whole group! You can check out the listening center activities blog post for a free file!