Stuck in the ice

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Into the ice mini-series, episode 55) is a short documentary about the Endurance, the wooden ship of the explorer Ernest Shackleton, who wanted to cross Antarctica on foot. In January 1915 the sea froze around the ship; for nine months the twenty-eight men lived on it, and in October the ice began to crush it. They camped on the ice, sailed small boats to Elephant Island, and Shackleton and five men crossed a very dangerous sea for sixteen days in the James Caird to find help. In August 1916 a ship from Chile arrived, and all twenty-eight men were alive. Most of the pictures are the expedition's own photos by Frank Hurley. The narration is in the past simple, with a present-simple opening (This is a wooden ship...); 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 (cross and frozen). The study topic is explorers and life in the polar ice, 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 (Frank Hurley's photo of the Endurance frozen in the ice, a drawing of the small boat in a storm, Hurley's photo of the men on Elephant Island), 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 go on a journey like this? Why, or why not?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates and numbers such as one thousand three hundred. The pack's key words explain the new words (frozen, leader, cross, photographer, camp, sink, wild, dangerous, alive, heavy, journey).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-travel-and-migration ("Voyages et migrations"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.