If you don’t know this amazing book then read it immediately, it’s fab!

I recently gave a presentation on using Bloom’s taxonomy in storytelling so I thought I should practice a little what I preach.

Remember:

Lower level skills are pretty basic, our traditional pre-teaching vocab comes under this category in naming, but you can go further by describing the animals – loads of great body vocab here! The pictures are quite detailed to so it’s good fun to find various things too.

Understand:

There’s a lot to discuss here, why are the animals mean to Gerald, predict what he will do, if the warthogs waltz and the chimps do a cha-cha, explain which animal dances disco, or rock and roll.

Apply:

Classify animals into various groups, two legs, four legs, can fly, etc. You can produce some great Venn diagrams while you revise structures with “have” and “can”. Show the animals what they should say and do with Gerald when they see he can’t dance very well.

Analyse:

Comparing is great with animals, who is bigger? taller? faster? Gerald might not win the dance competition but he might win something else, identify different competitions and explain which animals would win them. (A great lesson in how we’re all different but fab too!).

Evaluate:

Choose your favourite image, or animal, and justify why. Listen to the different types of music and prioritise them, favourites, best for going to sleep, best for a party. Watch some videos of dancing on youtube and rate the dancers.

Create:

This is where you can go as wild as the jungle animals. We had our own jungle dance, learners chose which animal they wanted to be and created their own masks. They designed posters and invitation cards, they discussed and recommended refreshments (crocodile & snake sweets, monkeys’ delight – bananas, and jungle juice in case you’re interested. They categorised the music to dance to, drew a room plan for the tables and “dance floor”.

And then we played our favourite jungle games:

Guess the Roar – blindfold one of the learners and get the others to take it in turn roaring,   guess which classmate is making that noise.

Find you friend – randomly give out pairs of animal cards, with the name or image of the animal on them depending on level and age. Learners must go round the room, making their noise or miming to find their partner. Noisy but great fun!

Finally my favourite, Sleeping Lions, learners pretend to be sleeping lions, the first one to move loses. Great for calming everyone down at the end of the party!

You can read more about our party and discover some more resources here.