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 time takes about 2 minutes and the activity itself 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 which are unfamiliar helps students to 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 which 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 belong 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 is says and draws based on what's been said. The drawing ends 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.