Teaching Notes for Living Things
Life cycle tag game: This is a simple outdoor tag game to reinforce life cycle vocabulary in the target
language. Choose either the life cycle of a frog or butterfly. One child is chosen to be ‘the egg’ they
must then tag another and shout either ‘tadpole’ or ‘caterpillar’ in the target language. This process
then continues with the next child becoming a ‘frog’ or ‘cocoon’ followed by ‘butterfly’. When a child
becomes a ‘frog’ or ‘butterfly’ they maintain this status and carry on tagging other children as ‘eggs’.
The game continues in this way until there is one player left who has not become a butterfly or frog
and they are the winner.
Parts of a plant movement game: using parts of a plant vocabulary in the target language. Learners
respond with different gestures corresponding to different parts of the plant when the teacher
names them in the target language: Stem, flower and leaves. The learners then also take turns of
calling out parts of the plant for others. This game can also be adapted for the life cycle of a plant.
E.g. Seed: curled up on the floor, Plant: upstretched arms, Flower: making circles with arms.
Animals and their habitats
www.icteachers.co.uk/resources/science/habitats.ppt: PowerPoint presentation in English. Excellent
introduction to animals and their habitats. Could also be edited to introduce vocabulary in the target
language.
Matching activity using the printable activity from http://aladouce.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/lesanimaux-et-leurs-lieux-de-vie.html provides plenty of opportunities for active learning around the
theme of animals and their habitats. This document is an editable PowerPoint presentation and
therefore can be adapted for any language. This is a matching activity with photographic images. The
practitioner can decide how many animals and habitats they wish to utilise and can build on
additional vocabulary in future learning.
The animal cards can be mixed in the middle of a table with the habitat cards surrounding them. The
learners can then match the animals to their corresponding habitats.
This activity could be put in place on a larger scale in the gym hall or outdoors. In this version it could
be played like corners. Learners would be given an animal card randomly and would then move
around the space (if indoors to music or outside they could sing an animal song) when the learners
are given a signal they must find their habitat in one of the corners of the space.
The following website is useful for teaching vocabulary about animals and habitats in French:
http://soutien67.free.fr/svt/animaux/animaux.htm. Introduce vocabulary using niveau 1 in the
reconnaissance section of the site. Practitioners will decide how many habitats and animals they
wish to introduce to the learners. This will depend on whether they are working with a P2, 3 or 4
class at first level.
The Language section then consolidates this learning. This site offers many activities to develop the
learning further with matching activities, guessing games and quizzes.
http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/science/contents_animals.htm Lots of useful resources for teaching
animals and their habitats. These resources are in English but many are editable and some are
images.
http://www.esqw.org/page41.htm online activity for learning the names of animals in Spanish
http://mentamaschocolate.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Animales%3A%20Ciclos%20Vitales a
selection of Spanish printable resources for the life cycle of various animals.
Very Hungry Caterpillar Resources
http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/The-Very-Hungry-Caterpillar-French-6307719/
PowerPoint presentation of the hungry caterpillar in French. This can be edited for any language.
http://www.kizclub.com/storypatterns/caterpillar(C).pdf Excellent set of cut out cards where the
caterpillar fits through the holes in the food.
http://www.dltk-teach.com/books/hungrycaterpillar/sequencing.htm story sequencing cards
http://www.dltk-teach.com/books/hungrycaterpillar/felt_fun.htm felt board cut outs
http://www.earlylearninghq.org.uk/stories/the-very-hungry-caterpillar/ a range of printable
resources which could be used for teaching languages