Seven thousand people, one building

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Arriving in New York mini-series, episode 39) is a short documentary about 97 Orchard Street, an old building in New York that is now the Tenement Museum. A single narrator explains that from 1863 to 1935 about seven thousand people lived there, from more than twenty countries, in apartments of three small rooms, about thirty square metres each: smaller than a classroom. At first the toilets were outside, in the yard; around 1905 they came inside, in the hall, two on each floor for four families. In the 1930s the Baldizzi family lived there: the parents came from Sicily, and the father was a cabinetmaker who made furniture out of wood. The building closed in 1935 and many years later became a museum, and their daughter Josephine, as an old woman, described her home to the museum. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the past simple, with smaller than, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 9 on facts and 1 on vocabulary (cabinetmaker). The study topic is migrations: arriving in New York. The museum photos show its restored apartments; the episode does not say which family's kitchen the last photo shows.

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 (What do you think was difficult in such a small apartment?) for a short class discussion, comparing with homes today. Learners should know the words building, room, kitchen and family, and be able to read numbers such as seven thousand. The pack's key words explain the new words (apartment, yard, hall, cabinetmaker, furniture). The script uses the American word apartment (British English: flat).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged languages-places-stories (5e, "Des langues, des lieux, des histoires", Cycle 4). The episode targets CEFR level A2-.