Canada: Maple syrup

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode, the spring episode of the mini-series Canada through the seasons, is a short documentary about a sugar shack, a small wooden house in a maple forest in Quebec. A single narrator explains how the sweet sap of maple trees becomes maple syrup (about forty litres of sap for one litre of syrup), says that the First Peoples of these forests made maple sugar long before Europeans arrived, and ends with maple taffy made on the snow. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and a little past simple, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (sugar shack, sap, maple taffy). The study topic is Canada through the seasons, one season per episode: here, spring.

Materials & prerequisites

The episode has four one-page printable sheets: a pupil pack (the text, three photos, the key words and the 10 questions), a teacher pack (the same page with the answers highlighted), a pupil sheet with the 10 questions only, and a teacher sheet with the answer key. There is no lesson plan. Learners should already know the words tree, snow, house and bottle, and understand numbers such as forty. The pack's key-word box explains 12 words, among them sugar shack, sap, tap, bucket and boil.

Curriculum alignment

Cycle 4 (5e). Axis: "Le quotidien : lieux, rythmes, saisons" (daily life: places, rhythms, seasons). The episode targets CEFR level A2-.