Homes: Underground desert houses

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Homes mini-series, episode 93) is a one-minute documentary about Coober Pedy, a small opal-mining town in the Australian desert, told with real photos and drawings. A single narrator explains that summers there are often more than forty degrees, so many people live in dugouts, homes dug into the hills, where it is always about twenty-three degrees; the town even has an underground church and hotel. Learners meet there's and there aren't to describe a home (there's a kitchen, a living room and bedrooms), the present simple (they live under the ground), a few past forms (came, dug, made), and a closing Would you like to ...? question. The vocabulary is about homes and rooms, towns, the weather, the seasons and temperatures. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (opals, dugout).

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 rooms of a house (kitchen, bedroom) and the numbers up to forty. Dugout names the subject, so it is taught for understanding; opal is explained in the episode (pretty stones in the ground).

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+.