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{Improv suggests creative movement in physical space. Was there a second phase of the game that used improv that isn't described here? This title is nice, but doesn't quite match what is here. Might Vocabulary Game be better? Please clarify. }

Introduction

The forest theme seemed a bit blasé to me at first glance, since talking Talking about animals and plants has been done to death. Looking for something that had some sort of a twist, I remembered the children's book The Gruffalo. For those unfamiliar, The Gruffalo is a story about a mouse walking along the forest and narrowly dodging dangerous encounters with the likes of snakes, owls and foxes that all want to eat him by saying he has a dinner appointment with a Gruffalo. The mouse describes the Gruffalo as a gruesome creature which scares off the larger animals. This was all a trick by the mouse who made the Gruffalo up. He then meets the Gruffalo which matches his exact previous description. The mouse is able to outsmart the Gruffalo by leading him down the same forest path where the animals from before ran away in fear of the Gruffalo who believed they ran away from the mouse. Of course, at the end of the story, the Gruffalo promptly runs away as well. I thought it would be a great idea to play with these unorthodox descriptions and recontextualize how the students deal with vocabulary they may have already learned.

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