The island at the door

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Arriving in New York mini-series, episode 37) is a short documentary about Ellis Island, a small island in New York Harbor. A single narrator explains that from 1892 to 1954 more than twelve million people arrived in America there, and that the first person on the first day was Annie Moore, a seventeen-year-old girl from Ireland who travelled with her two little brothers and received a ten-dollar gold coin as a welcome present. A drawing shows the doctors' quick check: a letter in white chalk on a coat meant "check this person again". The narrator then looks at a family story many people tell, "They changed our name at Ellis Island", and explains that it is a story, not history: the officers read the names from the ship's list, which came from Europe with the ship. Most people stayed only a few hours, then took a boat to New York. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the past simple, with dates and numbers, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app, all on facts. The study topic is migrations: arriving in New York.

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 Annie Moore felt on that first day?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words ship, boat, girl and name, and be able to read years such as 1892. The pack's key words explain the new words (officer, coin, chalk, check, history).

Curriculum alignment

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