The resource for day four of this week’s zoo and wild animals theme is a song.

Teachers are spoiled for choice of great songs available to teach about wild animals, ranging from the popular Five Little Monkeys or Walking in the Jungle, to Let’s Go To The Zoo. These songs have lots of wonderful associated TPR actions, and are great for shifting the energy of the class. That is, most of the songs are ‘stirrers’, which you can call upon in an impromptu fashion, if the children are feeling tired or losing focus.

Here’s another good choice, ‘Can an Elephant Jump?’ (including the actions) by ELF Learning.

And, when you need to settle the kids down, there’s the classic EFL calming game of sleeping lions.

In its simplest form, children pretend to be lions sleeping (on the floor).

Its a great opportunity to use this game or classroom management technique as a ‘transition’ phase in the class, where you and/or the teaching assistants pack up or set up the next activity as the children are pretending to be asleep like lions! (You might want to show them a picture of sleeping lions, so they can get the idea of what it is that they’re doing.)

You can read about another variation of this tool here. Feel free to adapt the basic idea to work in your particular classroom.