In this activity, students are encouraged to think about the five senses to explore a wild creature, writing a poem. The concept of the five senses is dual – how do our eyes experience the creature, and how does the creature see the world?
The activity has many opportunities for language exploration and language play, including onomatopoeia, focus on verbs, adjectives, colours, alliteration, etc., and can thus be tailored to explore a lot of different areas of language development.
Specifically, the activity also facilitates children in using all their languages to create a structured poem, which can use home languages as a way to create a guessing game for peers.
The activity could be used in the classroom, across multiple year groups, and could form the basis of a school-wide poetry competition, with opportunities for language performance and dissemination.
The activity is best-suited for KS2, but could be simplified and scaffolded for KS1, or even expanded for KS3. For younger children, it might work better as a “create a puzzle” activity.
Please note that there are two PowerPoint presentations to download, one with embedded sounds, one without.
There are opportunities to incorporate outdoor education, going on a sensory experience walk.
Have you used this activity?
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Oskar, 8, wrote this puzzle, thinking carefully about which words he could include in Slovak so that non-speakers of the language can still guess. Can you work out what the creature is, and what the various words in Slovak mean?
