Britain's strangest contests: the Olney pancake race

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (the mini-series Britain's strangest contests, one contest per episode) is a short documentary about the pancake race of Olney, a small town in England. A single narrator explains that every year on Pancake Day the women of the town run 380 metres down the street to the church door with a pancake in a frying pan, tossing it at the start and again at the end, and points at the apron and headscarf every runner wears, like cooks from long ago. The narrator then tells a story about the year 1445 and says that nobody knows if it is true, and explains that since 1950 a town in Kansas, Liberal, runs the same race on the same day: the two towns compare the winners' times on a video call, and Liberal wins most years. It is a comprehension episode: the narration uses the present simple and the past simple (heard, ran, started), there is, the superlative the fastest and would you like to, and no grammar point is taught. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (frying pan, apron, headscarf).

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 photos (runners with frying pans in aprons and headscarves, the church where the race ends, the starting-line sign in Liberal, Kansas), the key words and the 10 questions. The folder also holds a one-page pupil sheet with the 10 questions and a teacher sheet with the answer key. You can play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then use the closing question (What food would you like to race with?) for a short class discussion. Learners should know the words run, race, town and door, and be able to read years such as 1445 and 1950. The pack's key words explain Pancake Day, frying pan, toss and apron; headscarf (question 10) is explained in the question itself.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged school-and-leisure (5e, "École et loisirs", Cycle 4) and the-united-kingdom (5e, "Le Royaume-Uni"): a leisure tradition of England, shared with a town in the United States. The episode targets CEFR level A2-.