Introduction

The forest theme seemed a bit blasé to me at first glance since talking about animals and plants has been done to death. I was looking to do something that had some sort of twist and 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 by 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 matched his exact description from earlier. The mouse is later able to outsmart the Gruffalo by leading him down the same forest path where the animals from before run away in fear of the Gruffalo who believed they ran away from the mouse; the Gruffalo promptly runs away as well. I thought it would be a great idea to play around with these unorthodox descriptions and recontextualize how the students deal with vocabulary they might have already learned.

Target group and Time

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

Learning objectives

The goal of the activity is to teach vocabulary and surrounding body parts and forest animals. It's also good for teaching the students how to improvise and get more comfortable with the language by deviating from what they have been taught before. (i.e body parts are taught by using the example of a human) . Encountering vocabulary in contexts where they might not be used to using helps with broadening their use of the language.

Instructions to set up the activity

The game requires a blackboard or a sizeable surface to draw on along with chalk/drawing material. Group size should be from five and up. Before the game starts, ask for a volunteer; the volunteer 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 would be a good idea to employ 2 drawers and then also 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 (it helps if it's done on a sunny day so they have fun with the irony of it) in which they see an animal.  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 belong to. The participants can then follow the template sentence: "I saw an animal. It had ______ (body part) like a ______ (animal). The drawer is then supposed to follow what the rest of the group is saying and draw based on what's been said. The product will hopefully end up with a Gruffalo-style monster with body parts belonging to different animals and not necessarily a correct number of them. It would also be a good idea to show the group what it looks like and then give it a name.