Lucky mistakes: The Post-it Note

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Lucky mistakes mini-series, episode 97) is a short documentary about the invention of the Post-it Note. In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at the company 3M, wanted to make a very strong glue but made a weak one: it stuck to paper, but the paper could be pulled off easily and stuck again. For about five years nobody knew what to do with it, and he called it "a solution waiting for a problem". In 1974, his colleague Art Fry, who sang in a church choir, used the glue on the bookmarks that often fell out of his song book, and soon on notes. The notes did not sell well in 1977, but after the company gave free notes to offices in one city, people loved them; in 1980 they went on sale across the USA as Post-it Notes, yellow because the lab next door only had yellow paper. Today people use billions of sticky notes every year, and in 2011 office workers near Paris made big pictures with them on their windows. The narration is in the past simple, with the present simple for today; 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 (weak). The study topic is inventions and discoveries that began with a mistake or an accident.

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 drawing of Art Fry in the choir as his bookmarks fall out of his song book, a photo of Art Fry with a sticky note on his forehead, a photo of a picture made of sticky notes on an office window near Paris in 2011), 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: What would you write on a sticky note?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates. The pack's key words explain the new words (glue, weak, stick, company, solution, problem, choir, bookmark, sticky, sale, lab, billion).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-school-and-society ("École et société"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.