Outdoor ESL Activities

Mushroom Rain

Subject: Vocabulary

Skills: Listening

Level: Beginner

Recommended Age: 6-8 y.o.

Number of Participants: 6-12 players

Time: 20-30 minutes

Place: Asphalt or sand playground

Equipment: Not required

Materials: Pieces of chalk or wooden sticks by the number of players

Preliminary Preparation: Not required

Immediate Preparation (10-15 minutes).

1. Provide each participant in the game with a piece of chalk or a wooden stick.

2. First, disperse the children on the playground. Next, ask them to draw circles around themselves, which represent mushrooms caps.

3. Ask each player to choose if their ‘mushroom is edible or inedible’. Those children, who decide their mushrooms to be inedible, must draw spots ‘on their caps’, pretending they are fly-agarics.

4. When evrything is ready, bring the class to order.

How to Play. Before starting the competition, it would be feasible to do a demonstration game. To that end, tell the players to imagine that they are walking in the forest among mushrooms. In a few minutes after the children begin walking, you call out suddenly, e.g.: 'It's going to rain with potatoes!'. Upon hearing this, the players must ‘hide from the rain under the caps of edible mushrooms’, i.e. run in the corresponding circles. If you call out, e.g.: 'It's going to rain with balls!', the players must ‘hide under caps of inedible mushrooms’ and so on. When you are sure that the children understand the rules, start the competition. In this, a player, who is the last to run in a right circle or runs in a wrong one, drops out of the game. The competition lasts as long as only one participant is left. This last remaining player becomes the winner of the game. You can repeat this activity as many times as you wish.

Variation. As an alternative for stronger groups or higher levels, the last remaining player becomes the caller in the next round. In this case, the game continues as long as each participant, at least once, acts as the caller.