Introduction

The goal of this activity is to get children to engage with animals that can be found in the forest and also act those animals out. The students are supposed to think of animals that can be found in the forest. Afterwards those animals will be collected and students have to draw a random animal and act it out infront 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 ist 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 in the best case, where they are still in the early stages of learning English. It can theoretically also used for higher grades but in that case modifiers can be added to increase the difficulty, like for example not just writing down an animal but also what the animal is doing, so the acting part becomes more difficult as well as the guessing part of the game. For preparation and the final acting I would take probably 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 to rushed about it.

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 marker or pen, a bowl to collect the animals, maybe scissors if you don’t feel confident in your ripping abilities

To start of you need to prepare some paper that the students can write down their animals on. After having this the setup is basically done and you can start with the activity.

Letting it run

To start of 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 so all students know what animals are in contention of being acted out. 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. 

Students should come to the front one by one and draw an animal out of the ones you prepared before. 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”.