Pass the Chicken!

Whilst teaching at ISSOS I found a website that had a few teaching ideas on it, one of these ideas was 'Pass the Chicken'! Here's the website I found http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/lesson/field_day_games.shtml

For 'Pass the Chicken' you obviously need...wait for it...a chicken!

So, before I explain how 'Pass the Chicken' works, I needed to get a chicken. Luckily, I remembered that fancy dress shops sell them! So I looked up the local Cambridge fancy dress shops, looked through their websites, found one that sold them and then trekked into town to get one. Unfortunately, when I got their they didn't have any in stock (in hindsight I should have rang them 1st!), but being as kind as they were they put one on order for me and I went back at the end of my few weeks in Cambridge and got it!

It looks like this...

Anyway, this is how 'Pass the Chicken' works...

You 1st choose a random student (I'll do this by either using my random name generator or by simply throwing the chicken out to the class and seeing who gets it). This person is then the 'chicken'. You then give the 'chicken' a topic, say 'quadrilaterals'. They then state how many quadrilaterals they can name. Make sure at this point that it is a suitably high enough number, definitely over 5! Then, the 'chicken' passes the chicken to the next person in the class and then this person to the next and so on until the chicken naturally ends back up at the originally chosen student (the 'chicken'). However, if the 'chicken' manages to state the number of (in this case) quadrilaterals they said they could before the chicken gets back to them then the student currently holding the chicken becomes the new 'chicken' and the game starts over with a new topic. If the chicken does manage to get back to the original student (the 'chicken'), then they are the 'chicken' again and must start over with a new topic.

This should create a bit of intrigue when I get the chicken out for the first time, and hopefully engage the class in their learning. I can see this sort of activity working well at the start of a lesson to test how much they already know about a topic, or at the end of a lesson to see how much they have remembered!