Britain's strangest contests: cheese rolling

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the mini-series Britain's strangest contests, one contest per episode) is a short documentary about the cheese rolling race on Cooper's Hill, in the west of England. A single narrator shows how steep the hill is, then explains that at the end of May a man rolls a cheese of about 3 kilos down it, people run after it and most of them fall; the first person at the bottom wins the cheese. The narrator then points at the line of rugby players who catch the runners at the bottom, explains that nobody knows how old the race is (the first written record is from 1836), and that people ran after a wooden cheese in the two World Wars, when food was short. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and the past simple (was, ran), there is and there was, the imperative look and would you like to, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (steep, wooden, catch).

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 (men climbing the steep slope on hands and feet, runners sliding down the hill in a race, the rugby players lined up at the bottom), 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. You can play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then use the closing question (Would you like to run down this hill, or watch from the side?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words cheese, run, fall and win, and the months of the year. The pack's key words explain steep, roll, kilo and bottom; wooden and catch (questions 9 and 10) are explained in the questions themselves.

Curriculum alignment

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