American Schools

Objective & content

Two friends talk about American schools. One explains and the other asks questions: kids start in kindergarten at about five and finish in twelfth grade, through elementary, middle and high school, and the four high school years are called freshman, sophomore, junior and senior. About twenty-five million kids ride a yellow bus every school day; in most high schools the teachers stay in their classroom and the students move, with lockers in the hallway, lunch in the cafeteria, school colors, a mascot and Friday night football, and finally graduation. The grammar focus is present simple, with questions (What grade are you in?) and possessive adjectives (my school, your school, their caps). Learners listen for the ordinal numbers of the school years, the large numbers and the school vocabulary.

Materials & prerequisites

• Student sheet and teacher sheet, each as HTML and PDF (in the episode's printables folder).
• Prerequisites: present simple, numbers to one hundred, and basic school vocabulary.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c3-child-and-wider-environment, so it fits cycle 3 (6e). The episode targets CEFR A1+.