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There are plenty of types of listening tasks nowadays. Let us divide them into groups.

The passive type of listening. It means that a person is just listening to some text voiced by a professional actor or to a song and enjoying the sound of speech. According to our methods the songs are the most important part of learning a new language. By the way, it's considered to be good to give the kids under 2 years old English songs to listen (such as dance music or lullabies). That's the best learning material for babies ever!

There’s nothing similar in vocabulary of two different languages.

1. The mixed type of listening(passive and active). This type includes the situations when the kids are listening to a fairy tale that's being told by a teacher and are trying to figure out what's happening. For example it can be a finger-puppet theater. After that the kids must listen to the same text at home. They might do it the same day or the next one, but the thing is that the kids are listening to it without having the text in front of them so they imagine the narration in their heads. It also can be used as a bed time story.
2. The active type of listening. What that means is that while listening to the text, your child is to follow it in the book. They must put in the effort and try keeping up with the speaker. Also they must color the key words in the text (look into "Reading technique" chapter). When they confront the text the second time the kids are to sing along to the voice actors when coming upon the repetitive lines like :" Little pig, little pig, let me come in! No, no..." Don't forget to encourage your kids to roar or peep when it's needed.
3. - The listening tasks, when the kid tries to catch the drops of the needed information throughout the audio(as if they're catching the drops of rain), leaving the rest drip through the fingers. Then the most important information is to be written into the table or to be ticked (if there’s a multiple-choice task, where a kid has to choose the correct picture, word or a phrase).

- Exercises with songs, the kids listen to different songs and fill in the blanks in the lyrics.

-Speaking exercises. The kids listen to the text and then answer the questions. If you're teaching small kids, the task will be "show me what you hear".

- Artistic dictations (there is more information in a chapter devoted to it).  The children draw what the teacher tells them to.

- Detailed elaboration of key phrases (it's usually highlighted in special categories such as “Listen and repeat”). It is very important not to “mumble” or “murmur”, but to try to “mimic” the speaker, imitating their intonation, perhaps losing the middle of the phrase a little, but in no case deviate from the tempo and intonation.

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