Animal Vocabulary for Grades 1 to 3: How to Teach It So the Whole Class Joins In

If you want a lesson where every child joins in, teach animals. Children this age already love animals and already know a great deal about them, and no other topic gives you this much room for noises and actions. In a classroom where the teacher is willing to do the monkey noise, nobody ever forgets the word monkey.

Split the Words Into Three Groups by Familiarity

• Pets and animals close to home: cat, dog, bird, fish, rabbit. Start here, because children have seen these for real.
• Farm animals: cow, pig, duck, chicken, horse. Build on these with the noise each one makes.
• Wild and zoo animals: lion, tiger, elephant, monkey, bear, snake. This is the group children love most, so save it as a reward.

A Game With Nothing to Prepare: What Am I?

You or one of the children acts out an animal, complete with the sound it makes, and the rest guess in English. There's one rule: the answer has to be a full sentence, 'It is a cat!' The game drills vocabulary and the a and an sentence frame at the same time, and nobody in the room notices they're doing grammar.

A harder version for Grade 3: add an adjective. 'It is a big elephant.' 'It is a small bird.' Now one game covers animals and sizes together.

Get It Onto Paper So It Stays

After the game, the children need to write. What they remember from a bit of fun fades fast if nothing gets written down. A worksheet matching animal pictures to words, followed by one that asks them to fill in the missing letter (c_t, d_g), is the right order for this age. And the homework children in this topic do most willingly of all: draw your favourite animal and write its English name underneath.