A post office for penguins

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Into the ice mini-series, episode 57) is a short documentary about Port Lockroy, on a tiny island near the coast of Antarctica. British people built a base there in 1944, Base A, and scientists worked in it until 1962; today it is a museum with a shop and a post office, looked after by a charity, the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust. Every summer, from about November to March, a team of four or five people lives there; up to eighteen thousand visitors come by ship, and about seventy thousand cards leave every year for more than one hundred countries. The team also counts the gentoo penguins, which nest next to the buildings: most of the island is open to visitors and a smaller part is only for the penguins, so scientists can see if visitors are a problem for the birds. The narration uses the present simple, with the past simple for the history; no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (post office and neighbours). The study topic is explorers and life in the polar ice, then and now.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three photos (the red post box, Bransfield House with its red windows, a gentoo penguin on its nest of stones), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question (Think about it: Would you like to work at Port Lockroy for a summer? Why, or why not?). Learners should know the present simple and be able to read large numbers such as seventy thousand. The pack's key words explain the new words (neighbour, penguin, base, museum, charity, visitor, season, postcard, mail, nest, chick).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-travel-and-migration ("Voyages et migrations"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.