Britain's strangest contests: bog snorkelling

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the mini-series Britain's strangest contests, one contest per episode) is a short documentary about the World Bog Snorkelling Championships, near a very small town in the middle of Wales. A single narrator explains what a bog is, how people dug a long trench of dark brown water in it, and the strange rule: swimmers go two lengths with a snorkel and flippers, but their arms must stay in the water, so only a little tube shows. The narrator then tells how the champion, a teacher, won the first time he tried, and that the bog is a sheep field and a protected home for frogs the rest of the year. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and the past simple (dug, won, tried), there is, cannot and must for the rules, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (bog, snorkel, flippers).

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 trench of brown water with spectators on the bank, a swimmer with a mask and a snorkel in the trench, sheep in a field near the town), the key words and the 10 questions. The folder also holds a one-page pupil sheet with the 10 questions and a teacher sheet with the answer key. Play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then use the closing question (Would you like to swim in a bog?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words swim, water, arms and legs, and the months of the year. The narration explains bog in words, and the slideshow labels snorkel and flippers on the swimmer.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged school-and-leisure (5e, "École et loisirs", Cycle 4) and the-united-kingdom (5e, "Le Royaume-Uni"): a leisure tradition of Wales. The episode targets CEFR level A2-.