Love letters to trees

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Greener cities mini-series, episode 34) is a short documentary about Melbourne. In 2013 the city gave each of its trees a number and an email address, so that people could report a fallen branch or an ill tree. People also wrote thank-you messages, poems and love letters to the trees (more than three thousand emails), and the tree team sometimes answered in the name of the tree. The city now plans to cover forty per cent of the city with leaves by 2040. The narration uses the past simple, with could, and the present simple; no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (branch and shade). The study topic is how cities change to be greener and better to live in.

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 (the Melbourne skyline, the elms of Fitzroy Gardens, an elm tree), 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: Which tree would you write to, and what would you say?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read large numbers such as seventy thousand and years such as 2040. The pack's key words explain the new words (branch, ill, shade, surprising, poem, love letter, university).

Curriculum alignment

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