School in the dark

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Unusual schools mini-series, episode 32) is a short documentary about Grise Fiord, a small village in the far north of Canada and the most northern village in the country. A single narrator explains that about one hundred and forty people live there, most of them Inuit, and that most people speak two languages, English and Inuktitut, the Inuit language. The village has one school, Umimmak School, where the children learn in Inuktitut and in English. In winter it is often minus thirty degrees, and from November to the middle of February the sun does not rise at all, so the children go to school in the dark and come home in the dark; in February the sun comes back, and people go outside to see it for the first time in more than three months. In spring, the school takes the pupils "out on the land", to learn the skills of Inuit life. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple, with the most northern and often, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 8 on facts and 2 on vocabulary (Inuktitut, out on the land). The study topic is school life: unusual schools in the English-speaking world.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script. Each pack is a one-page PDF with the text, three photos, the key words and the 10 questions: a pupil pack, and a teacher pack with the answers highlighted. It also has a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key. It has no lesson plan. Play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then use the closing question (Would you like to go to school in the dark?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words winter, cold, sun and dark, and be able to read minus thirty degrees. The pack's key words explain the new words (northern, language, Inuktitut, degree, rise).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged school-and-leisure (5e, "École et loisirs", Cycle 4). The episode targets CEFR level A2-.