Collective Noun Performance
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Skills: Level: Class Size: | Speaking Intermediate - Advance Any |
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| Materials: | None |
Objective
Collective Noun Performance is an efl/esl grammar activity similiar to charades. In the activity, students act out a collective noun while the rest of the class tries to guess what the noun is.
Collective nouns refer to a "group" of something, such as a crowd of people. Collective nouns also represent one greatest oddities of the English language, their expressions are so common and yet so ambiguous that it is difficult even for a native English speaker to determine it's exact meaning. Consider these phrases:
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Litter of kittens Deck of cards Crowds of people Flock of birds A herd of antelope A hive of bees An army of ants A swam of locusts A colony of termites A yoke of cattles A drove of cattle |
A tribe of baboons A bunch of grapes Flock of geese Pack of wolves Culture of bacteria A panel of experts A flight of birds Congregation of believers Colony of penguins A chain gang A brood of chickens |
Before you introduce this activity, it's a good idea to review the meaning of these phrases. You can do this by getting estimates from the class what they think the estimated size of each collective noun phrase is. For example "a drove of cattle" means more than "a yoke of cattles (two)" and so on.
Instructions
1. Before beginning this activity, group your students into pairs or small groups and choose a player to be "It". "It" comes up to the front of the class and acts out a collective noun, interacting with other members or the class if necessary.
2. The class must try to guess if "It" is a person, animal or thing and what the collective noun is. The person to make the right guess becomes "It".
Variations
Another variation of this popular grammar activity is to prepare a list of thirty collective nouns on small pieces of paper. Put the pieces of paper into an envelope and have students pick a collective noun to act out.