Ireland: Skellig Michael

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Ireland mini-series, episode 132) is a short documentary about Skellig Michael, a huge rock in the Atlantic Ocean about twelve kilometres from the coast of Ireland. More than a thousand years ago, a small group of monks came to live there. There were no trees, so they built everything with stones: small round huts that look like beehives, built without any cement, and more than six hundred stone steps. Life on the rock was very hard, with strong winds and big storms, and around the twelfth or thirteenth century the monks left. Today the island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; visitors can come by boat in summer, only when the sea is calm, and only 180 people a day. Thousands of puffins live there in summer, and in 2014 and 2015 film-makers came to make Star Wars films, in which it is Luke Skywalker's island. The narration is in the present simple and the past simple; no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 9 on facts and 1 on vocabulary (puffins). The study topic is Ireland: its traditions and places, then and now.

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 pictures (a photo of the island's two peaks from the sea, a drawing of the monks building a beehive hut, a photo of three beehive huts), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question (Think about it: Would you like to visit Skellig Michael? Why, or why not?). Learners should know the present simple and the past simple of common verbs and be able to read large numbers. The pack's key words explain the new words (coast, rock, ocean, monk, hut, beehive, cement, step, storm, century, calm, puffin).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre") and ireland (4e axis 6, "L'Irlande"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.