Chuck The Chicken Game Pack

Striking a pitched ball into a specific gap in the outfield is genuinely difficult. Understanding why you'd want to is not.

Most striking and fielding games ask students to do both at once, which means the tactical idea gets buried under the mechanics. A student who can't yet make solid contact never gets to the interesting question, because they're still trying to hit the thing at all.

Chuck The Chicken separates them. Throwing a rubber chicken to an open space is easy, so the difficulty drops away and what's left standing is the tactical decision: where is nobody, and how do I get the object there? Once students have discovered that on offence, it carries forward into every harder game in the unit.

This is why it sits early in my grade six striking and fielding sequence, right after Race To The Bases and well before anything with real defensive complexity.

🐔 Build One: Chicken Coop Countdown. Teams in circle formation, running laps for points with a tennis ball as the baton. This is the scoring mechanic on its own.

🥚 Build Two: Egg Farm Fielding. Eggs scattered across the space, teams lining up and passing over and under to the back of the line. This is the defensive relay on its own.

🏃 Build Three: Chuck The Chicken. Both halves come together. One team runs the circle scoring laps, the other fields and relays, and whoever ends up at the back of the line throws the chicken and flips the roles.

The prompt that does the most work here is a question, not an instruction. Students start out throwing the chicken as far as they possibly can, which feels right and is usually wrong, because a long throw straight down the middle is the easiest thing in the world to field. Ask them where the fielding team is standing before they throw, and watch the game turn from a throwing contest into a thinking one.

The pack includes the full game, all three builds with their diagrams, learning targets, discussion questions, assessment ideas, and teacher notes.

Happy Teaching!

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