Introduction

The goal of this activity is to help children to engage with animals that can be found in the forest. Students are supposed to think of animals that can be found in the forest. Afterwards these animals will be collected and students have to draw a random animal and act it out in front of their peers. When one of their peers guesses an animal they get the card with the animal on it and in the end the student with the most animal cards is the “winner” of the activity. Even though winning in this activity is not important, the idea of it can encourage the students to engage more with the activity.

Target group and Time

The target group for this activity are children in 3-4 grade when they are still in the early stages of learning English. It can theoretically also be used for higher grades, but in this case the game should be changed to increase the level of difficulty, like for example not just writing down an animal but also what the animal is doing. In this way, the acting as well as the guessing part of the game becomes more difficult. Preparation and the final acting probably take one lesson of 45 minutes. This way you can introduce the children to the idea of the task, have a decent time to collect all of their ideas and also act them out after without feeling rushed.

Learning objectives

The goal is to strengthen the children’s vocabulary concerning the animals they are acting out and maybe also introducing some new vocabulary by pointing out what the animals are doing and how they would behave in certain situations. It also gets the students active and could take some fear of being in front of a group of people for them.

Instructions to set up the activity

Materials: Paper, some markers or pens, a bowl to collect the animals card, maybe scissors if you don’t feel confident in your ripping abilities.

To start off, prepare some paper that the students can write down their animals on. For this I used empty pieces of paper that were handed out to the students during the activity so that they were able to write down the animals of their choice by themselves. It is also useful to think of some animals to use during the activity, so if students have problems think of them they can get support. After having this the setup is basically done and you can start with the activity.

Letting it run

To start off, I found it helpful to get the students into an acting mood by doing a little warm up of stretching. What exactly you do is left up to you but the students should be moving in some way so they get prepared for the task. 

After the warm up you should have a short conversation about the area you can find the animals you want to act out in. In my case that was the forest so we started by introducing the forest and what the students know about it. When the framework is established you can start by asking students to name animals that can be found in the forest. These animals should be collected on the blackboard and on the prepared pieces of paper, by the students, so all students know what animals are in contention of being acted out. For this the students write down their animals on the empty paper cards. During our session we used basic forest animals like owls, bees, foxes and bears. Generally any animal found in the forest can be used though so it is advisable to let the children be creative and have them think themselves of what animals to use. After collecting a reasonable amount of animals for the size of the group (should be at least one for every student that wants to participate) you can start the acting part. The prepared cards are now shuffled so every acting student is able to randomly draw one of them to act out.

Students should come to the front one by one and pull an animal out of the ones you prepared before. This way everybody knows what animals exit but not which will be acted out infront of them. After giving them a moment to think about how to act out the animal they start acting and the rest of the class has to guess which animal is being acted out. Whoever guesses first gets to keep the animal. This is kept running until all animals are used up and there is a “winner”.