The United States

Objective & content

Two hosts, Jessa and Jeff, open the series with a road-trip joke and give a first map of the United States: fifty states, a country about the size of Europe, and about 340 million people. Jessa explains and Jeff asks and jokes. They name four regions (the East Coast, the South, the Midwest and the West Coast), show that Washington, D.C. is the capital and not New York, and explain four time zones on the mainland and six with Alaska and Hawaii. The main practice is the present simple with large numbers and place names; question words and prepositions of place and time appear only in small ways in the script. The main skill is listening; one line to notice is "That's not a country. That's a continent with a flag."

Materials & prerequisites

• Student sheet and teacher sheet, each as a PDF and an HTML file (in the episode's printables).
• Learners should know the present simple, basic question words (what, where, who) and numbers up to fifty.

Curriculum alignment

Axis: Child and wider environment (c3-child-and-wider-environment; cycle 3, 6e). The episode meets it by placing a faraway country on the map: its size compared with Europe, its regions, its capital and its time zones. The episode targets CEFR level A1+.