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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.
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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 draw 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”.
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