This document describes two activities to develop naturalistic intelligence in students. The first activity divides students into groups and sends them on a treasure hunt around campus to find plastic animals using clues on color cards. The second activity has students work in groups to guess which animal classmates are by asking yes/no questions while only using short answers. Both activities aim to teach vocabulary outdoors and through interactive games to make learning more engaging than traditional methods. They also develop other types of intelligence like linguistic, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal skills.
2. Introduction
Children having naturalistic intelligence may exhibit some of the following characteristics: They may:
1. Have keen sensory skills - sight, sound, smell, taste and touch.
2. Readily use heightened sensory skills to notice and categorize things from the natural world.
3. Like to be outside, or like outside activities like gardening, nature walks or field trips geared toward
observing nature or natural phenomena.
4. Notice patterns easily from their surroundings -- likes, differences, similarities, anomalies.
5. Are interested and care about animals or plants.
6. Notice things in the environment others often miss.
7. Create, keep or have collections, scrapbooks, logs, or journals about natural objects -- these may
include written observations, drawings, pictures and photographs or specimens.
8. Be very interested, from an early age, in television shows, videos, books, or objects from or about
nature, science or animals.
9. Easily learn characteristics, names, categorizations and data about objects or species found in the
natural world.
3. Treasure Hunt
Aim: Students should be able to learn in a natural environment.
Contents: vocabulary of nature (plants and animals) and
directions.
Materials: colour cards with instructions for each group, plastic
animals.
Location: Campus of the University of
Alicante
Students: 30
4. Steps
The class is divided into 6 groups of five students.
Each group is assigned a different colour card.
Each group has to find a different plastic animal.
Each member of the group must wear a distinguishing object of
the colour assigned to the group.
The aim of each group is to follow the instructions of their card
and find their correspondent plastic animal.
Remarks: the teachers (2) will give instructions to the groups and will
supervise the work they carry out.
5. Who am I?
Location: classroom
Aims: students learn and have fun working with
pictures of animals.
Contents: vocabulary related to colours, textures,
animals and their different parts; use of the
interrogative constructions in present simple; yes/no
questions; short answers.
Materials: animal cards.
6. Steps
The students are divided into groups of
six people.
Each student puts a card on their front
without knowing which animal is it.
By turns, they make questions to the
others students in the same group in
order to guess which animal they are.
The others can only replay with short
answers.
Remarks: the teacher must control that
the students use English for that
purpose.
7. Conclusions
With both activities we want the students to learn contents in a different way
which would probably be more difficult in a traditional manner. The fact of being
outside and finding out which character they are become an enjoyable
alternative.
These exercises develop not only the naturalistic intelligence but also others
such as:
linguistic (students demonstrate their linguistic skill in other language)
spatial (they need to move in a specific place and identify certain objects)
bodily-kinesthetic (when talking in a second language, sometimes it is
needed to reinforce what we want to say by moving our hands and other
gestures, etc)
interpersonal (cooperation among all the members of the group so they'll
solve the activity, specially in the first activity)
intrapersonal (thinking before talking, specially in the second activity)