Planet Earth 2
Posted: November 14, 2016 Filed under: Documentary, lesson plan | Tags: iguana, music, nature, planet earth, prediction, sloth, snake, speculation, storytelling 4 Comments
Main activities Speculating, predicting, storytelling
Suitable for teens and adults pre-advanced and above (B2.2)
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes.
Employable Me
Posted: July 20, 2016 Filed under: Documentary, lesson plan, Uncategorized | Tags: collocation, impressions, listening, speaking, vocabulary, work 8 Comments
MAIN ACTIVITIES collocations with impression, talking about work, watching clips from a documentary about job seekers with neurological conditions such as autism and Tourette syndrome.
SUITABLE FOR teens and adults, pre-advanced (B2.2) and above
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes.
Beetle Brawl
Posted: May 16, 2016 Filed under: Documentary, lesson plan | Tags: appearance, beetle, listening, ordering, personality, speaking, vocabulary 4 Comments
MAIN ACTIVITIES describing personality and appearance, watching a clip from a nature documentary, ordering a text
SUITABLE FOR teens and adults, pre-advanced (B2.2) and above
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes.
Ice Skating Penguins
Posted: February 3, 2016 Filed under: Documentary, lesson plan | Tags: collocation, listening, pronunciation, speaking, vocabulary 2 Comments
Adelie Penguin by David Cook is licensed under CCBY2.0
MAIN ACTIVITIES talking about learning how to do something new, collocations and pronunciation
SUITABLE FOR teens and adults, upper-intermediate (B2) and above
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes
Base-jumping Barnacle Goose
Posted: March 19, 2015 Filed under: Documentary, lesson plan | Tags: CAE, David Attenborough, dictation, FCE, listening 4 Comments
Base-jumping in Norway by Andre Benedix is licensed under CCBY2.0
MAIN AIMS Listening, using a dictionary, prediction and sentence transformations
SUITABLE FOR teens and adults, pre-advanced (B2.2) and above
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes
Watch the video until the end – it doesn’t turn out to be as bad as you might expect!
Giraffe Fight
Posted: July 7, 2014 Filed under: Documentary, lesson plan | Tags: Africa, giraffe, prediction, speaking, visualization, vocabulary 4 Comments
Giraffe, Giraffa camelopardalis play fighting at Marakele National Park, Limpopo, South Africa by Derek Keats is licensed under CCBY2.0
MAIN ACTIVITIES Visualization, speaking, gap fill, vocabulary acquisition, prediction.
SUITABLE FOR Teens and adults, Pre-Advanced (B2.2) and above
TEACHER’S NOTES (Click here for a pdf of the Teacher’s Notes.)
STEP 1
Tell students that they are going to listen to something with their eyes closed. After listening, they tell a partner about the images they visualized. Who did they see? Where? What were they doing? Why? etc. Play from 00:25 to 01:02 (sound only).
STEP 2
Students tell each other what they visualized in as much detail as possible. Ask a couple of students to tell the rest of the class what they talked about. Did most people have similar ideas?
STEP 3
Play the clip again, this time with both sound and images. Students (in pairs) answer the questions in step 1 based on what they saw. (Two male giraffes are going to fight over a female in the African desert.)
STEP 4
Tell students that they are going to read a description of the fight. Display or give them a copy of the script. They read it quickly and say which word which is out of place.
STEP 5
Now they work together to replace the word banana** with another word (a different one for each banana).
STEP 6
Play the video from 01:05 to 03:23 so that students can compare what they wrote with the words used in the documentary. (rival, chance, blows, desert, fight, legs, reign)
STEP 7
Students vote on which giraffe will win – the old bull or the young rival. Play the clip until 04:35 and ask how the the old giraffe won (He ducked and aimed a blow at his rival’s underbelly). Tell students that the young giraffe didn’t die; he was just knocked out.
STEP 8
Say that the clip comes from the first episode of the BBC series Africa, and encourage those who like nature programmes to look for more David Attenborough documentaries and watch them in English. If you have a class wiki, students can look for nature clips on YouTube, upload them and comment on each other’s choices.
** The banana idea comes from this post about different ways to do a gap fill / cloze on David Petrie’s blog.
Crab Invasion
Posted: April 21, 2014 Filed under: Documentary, lesson plan | Tags: BBC, crabs, eggs, listening, pronunciation, vocabulary, word cloud 2 Comments
In our third post this month, eggs get another mention, a word cloud makes another appearance, and there’s a focus on words with multiple meanings. This time we use footage from the BBC documentary series Wild Caribbean. In the clip we see a cast of crabs (or a consortium of crabs, according to some sources) travel from land to sea to lay their eggs. And this week there’s no boiling, scrambling, poaching, frying or chocolate eggs to make starving students faint with hunger during classes at lunch or dinner time.
Click here for the Teacher’s Notes.
All at C 