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.

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.

Learning objectives

The goal of this activity is to practice vocabulary about body parts and forest animals. It also encourages students to improvise and become more comfortable with the language by deviating from what they have been taught before (e.g., using human examples for body parts). Encountering vocabulary in contexts that are unfamiliar helps students broaden their use of the language.

Instructions to set up the activity

The game requires a blackboard or a sizeable surface to draw on with chalk or other drawing materials. Group size should be from five and up. Before the game starts, ask for a volunteer who will be the one responsible for drawing on the board. Depending on the skill level of the group, you can ask them to name the animals they know as a hint system for later. If the group size exceeds 8, it is a good idea to employ two drawers and break up the template sentence into two parts where the first student can mention the body part, and then the student next to them can say which animal it belonged to. 

Letting it run

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 a number that is assumed an animal would have (e.g. 8 bear-sized legs). After showing the group what the animal looks like, it is  a good idea to give the creature a name.