Battle Animals

In classes, my second years are studying comparatives (more, better, faster) and superlatives (most, best, strongest).

I decided, what better way to use comparatives and superlatives to have a pokemon battle?

Well, okay, I didn't use pokemon. I used great white sharks, grizzly bears, Lady Gaga, and Jack Sparrow instead. But it was pretty epic.

So, students got to chose which team they wanted to be (Team Clydestale and Team Charizard [Oh! there is a pokemon!]), and then they had three-ish minutes to write as many sentences about their animal as they could. I told them it was certain that the Squirrel was the fastest, sneakiest, smartest, and most dangerous-- because squirrels are ninja! [Hey, nifty ways to model language! And teach them truths of the universe.] Then I told them they had to pick their favorite sentence and memorize it, and then race to write them on the board (relay-fashion, passing the chalk down the line).

There was one student had wanted to get President Obama (he had marked Obama as "the best of all" at the beginning of the class when I asked the students which they thought was the best animal), but his team had chosen horse. So he was writing sentences like "Horse is dirtier than Obama" and "Horse is not as fast as Obama."

I gave one point for each correctly written sentence.

Jack Sparrow and Obama had a pretty intense show-down, but the squirrel kicked all their butts!