Britain's strangest contests: the conker championships

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the mini-series Britain's strangest contests, one contest per episode) is a short documentary about conkers and the World Conker Championships. A single narrator shows a conker, the shiny brown seed of the horse chestnut, warns that it is poisonous, and explains the playground game: a conker on a string hits a friend's conker, and the owner of the conker that breaks loses. The narrator then turns to the championships, held every October in a village in England, where players take a conker from a bag without looking. The narrator looks closer at the horseshoe-shaped marks on a horse chestnut branch and tells how an American woman won the world title in 2024, one year after she learned the game. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and the past simple (won, learned, got), the imperative Don't eat it, cannot for the rule, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (poisonous, string, without looking).

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 (a conker half out of its spiky green case, a conker on a string, a horse chestnut twig with its horseshoe-shaped marks), 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 (Is conkers a sport, or just a game?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words tree, leaf, bag and game, and the seasons and months. The script explains its new words as it goes (conker, horse chestnut, poisonous). The episode says at once that a conker is poisonous and must not be eaten.

Curriculum alignment

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