Game - Revise animal names

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teacherabroad

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Hi, I am a new teacher and am trying to think of a game I can play with my students to revise animal names. Any ideas on what games would be appropriate:?:
 

BobK

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I'm not sure what you mean? - Something like calling a hippopotamus a 'river-horse' or a pterodactyl a 'finger-wing'...? If so, the Greeks got there first!

b
PS I've moved this from the Ask a Teacher forum (where students pose questions for teachers to answer).
 

ICAL_Pete

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Try 'Talking Dictionaries' - flashcards where students have to describe the animal they see without using its name and others have to guess.

Talking Dictionaries
 

BobK

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An idea off the top of my head, based on the charming story of the naming of the bat.*

Two teams produce list of monosyllabic animals, and exchange their lists. Then designated artists in each team (or everyone?) draw a picture of a fantastic animal made up of any two of these monosyllables. When that's finished, the teams swap pictures and try to guess how the pictures share two of the team's own monosyllables. So, if there were 10 original monosyllables there will be five pictures - say a hen-bird a cow-goat a sheep-bear a pig-cat and a dog-duck. (Of course, there's only one set of correct answers, so the guessing stage will not be that easy.)

b

PS * One of the earliest sources for Vulgar Latin is what seems to be a sort of 5th century phrase book, directed at Latin-speaking travellers and giving them hints about what sort of vulgarisms they should avoid. So while trying to make sure everyone 'speaks proper', they tell philologers how Romance languages got to be the way they are.

One of the lines is "vespertilio, non calva soricem". Vespertilio gives the Italian pipistrello, and calva soricem gives French chauve souris. But what is bald (calva) about a bat?

The answer seems to be that a scribe confused "lv" with "w", and once one scribe had done it the error spread through repeated generations of manuscript copies. There was the Celtic word kawa (which found its way through the complex processes of French phonology - most of which I don't know about - to the modern chouan). And the inexplicable "bald mouse" becomes the much more sensible "owl-mouse".
 
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