{1.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. 2. The title is also quite long, meaning that it won't be read unless one clicks on it. Suggestion: "The animal had how many heads? - Nikola". You can clarify vocabulary and or improv in the objectives.}

Introduction

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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Target group and Time

The activity is primarily aimed at younger groups of students (4th-5th grade). The setup takes about 2 minutes and the activity lasts ca. 10-15 minutes.

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You can do a short intro where you explain to the group that they're in a dark forest in which they see an animal. (Doing this activity outside on a sunny day invites learners to enjoy the irony of the situation.)  After that, you can tell them that they are visiting a sketch artist and are trying to describe the animal. Since it was dark, no one is sure what exactly they saw so they can start naming body parts and to what animal they belonged to. The participants can then follow the template sentence: "I saw an animal. It had ______ (body part) like a/an ______ (animal). The drawer then follows what the rest of the group says and draws based on what's been said. Preferably, you'd want the drawing to be kept for a surprise reveal at the end. The drawing ends up looking like a Gruffalo-style monster with body parts belonging to different animals and not necessarily an amount a number that is assumed an animal would have (e.g. 8 bear-sized legs). It would also be a good idea to show After showing the group what it the animal looks like and then give it a name. 

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, it is  a good idea to give the creature a name.