Eight Quick Challenges to Improve Your Hearing With a Cochlear Implant

Want to keep your listening skills at the top of their game and get the most out of your cochlear implant? Great! No matter how long you’ve had your CI, it’s always worth challenging your brain to help improve your hearing. But finding time for a quick bit of practice isn’t always easy.

With that in mind, we’ve put together eight quick listening challenges for you to complete. Try to complete one per week, or up the ante by doing one a day.

Listening Challenge #1: Reading

Ease into the listening challenges with a simple reading task. Choose an article from your favorite newspaper or magazine, and pick a friend or family member. Ask them to read the article out loud to you. When they’re done reading, summarize what the article said and then discuss the key points with them.

Listening Challenge #2: Podcasts

Podcasts are another great way to improve your hearing. To complete this challenge, find a podcast on a subject that interests you—anything works from cooking and gardening to current affairs and true crime. Listen to it at a speed you feel comfortable with. When you’re done, talk about what you learned with a friend or family member.

Listening Challenge #3: Cooking

Ready to get creative in the kitchen? The third listening challenge is all about cooking. First, find a new recipe you’d like to try, and buy all the ingredients you need. Ask a friend over for dinner and get them to read the recipe out loud to you. Listen to and follow their instructions as you cook.

Listening Challenge #4: Music

The more you practice listening to music, the better it will sound. This challenge is a quick and easy way to get some music practice in. All you have to do is choose a playlist (we recommend our CI-friendly Spotify playlist) and hit shuffle. Then practice trying to guess the name of the song and artist(s).

Listening Challenge #5: Tricky Words

Time to practice hearing tricky words! To complete this challenge, write down ten words you find hard to understand. Then hand the list over to a friend or family member. Ask your friend to say one of them in a sentence. Listen closely and guess which word they said. Try this a few times with different words.

Listening Challenge #6: Rehab Kits

Our Adult Rehabilitation Kits were originally developed for rehab professionals, but you can use them at home as well to improve your hearing. For this challenge, just choose one that sounds most interesting from this list and then complete an activity from it.

Listening Challenge #7: Maps

Time to practice listening to directions—this challenge is all about maps. To get started, download or print this map. Next, ask a friend or family member to give you directions from one point on the map to another. Use the map to follow along with their directions.

Listening Challenge #8:

For the final challenge, we’re going to test your listening skills with a quiz. Listen to the video below and try to guess how many different musical instruments you can hear.

And that’s it! Listening Challenge completed. Which challenge did you find the hardest? Let us know in the comments below.

Want more rehabilitation activities to try at home? We have plenty of blog articles and resources to help improve your hearing.