Homes: Igloos

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Homes mini-series, episode 92) is a one-minute documentary about the igloo, the snow house of the Canadian Arctic, told with real photos, old and new, and drawings. A single narrator explains that the Inuit built the first igloos and that their word iglu means any house, shows how the blocks of snow go round and up in a spiral to a round roof, and says why it is warm inside; it ends on the Inuit today, who live in modern houses, while some hunters still build igloos on the ice. Learners meet the present simple to describe and explain (people build, you cut, the snow keeps the cold out), This is ..., one past simple (built), the comparative much warmer, the possessive their and a closing Would you like to ...? question. The vocabulary is about homes, the weather and numbers (minus forty degrees). Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (igloo, iglu, Inuit).

Materials & prerequisites

You need the episode (audio and slideshow) and the printables: a one-page pupil pack and teacher pack (the text, three pictures, the key words and the 10 questions, with the answers highlighted in the teacher pack), a pupil question sheet and a teacher answer key. There is no lesson plan. Learners should know the numbers to forty and the present simple with you and they (they build igloos). Igloo, Inuit and Arctic name the subject, so they are taught for understanding; block and spiral are shown or explained in the episode.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged daily-life-living-playing-learning (6e, "Le quotidien : vivre, jouer, apprendre", study topic "The living spaces of students in English-speaking countries", Cycle 3). The episode targets CEFR level A1+.