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Animal Randomizer

For teachers

One animal per child, and why that matters

Hand out animals at random and two children will get the same one. It happens more often than people expect, and it quietly spoils the task.

Published . Last updated .

Why duplicates spoil it

Three things go wrong, and none of them are obvious until the work comes back in.

  • The second child copies. Not dishonestly, usually: they simply see a finished answer on the next table and stop thinking.
  • The display board looks like a mistake. Two identical elephants on a wall of thirty drawings reads as carelessness, and the children notice before you do.
  • Someone feels cheated. “Mine is the same as his” is a small thing that takes five minutes to settle.

How to do it

  1. Count the children in the class.
  2. Enter that number in How many.
  3. Leave Group on All groups.
  4. Keep no-repeats on.
  5. Select Generate.
  6. Select Print worksheet.
  7. Cut the sheet along the dashed lines.
  8. Hand one slip to each child.

That is the whole method. The batch never contains the same animal twice, so the slips cannot collide.

When the class is bigger than the group

The smallest group holds 46 animals. Ask one group for more than it holds and the generator returns the whole group and tells you so, rather than repeating to fill the gap.

Two ways out. Leave Group on All groups, which draws from all 448. Or keep the group and split the class in half across two lessons.

Two classes in one day

Leave the page open between lessons. No-repeats remembers every animal it has already shown, so the second class gets a completely different set from the first.

One catch worth knowing before it bites you: reloading the page clears that memory. Nothing is stored on your device, which is good for privacy and inconvenient here. Print both sets before you close the tab.

The thing this does not fix

Every animal is equally likely. That is not the same as equally easy.

A child who draws an African elephant has a library shelf to work from. A child who draws a housefly has a paragraph. If the task is research, that gap is unfair, and no amount of randomness fixes it. Read the batch before you cut it up, and do one of these:

  • Narrow the group first. Mammals and Birds are the two groups where almost every animal has plenty written about it.
  • Pair the thin ones. Two children on one obscure animal beats one child with nothing to find.
  • Change the question. “Draw it and label three parts” works for a housefly and an elephant equally well.

Groups worth knowing before you choose

  • Mammals90 animals
  • Birds89 animals
  • Reptiles62 animals
  • Amphibians46 animals
  • Fish71 animals
  • Invertebrates90 animals

You can ask for up to 50 animals at once, which covers any single class. Generate a batch or read all 448 animals.

The six labels above are the ones children argue about, and every one of them has an animal in this catalog that breaks its rule. The six animal groups, in plain words gives each group in one sentence and names the animals that break it, which is worth five minutes before you filter a batch by group.

Once everyone has an animal, the obvious next twenty minutes is acting them out. Animal charades that work for any age has the rules, the timings by age, and what to do about the animals nobody can act.

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