California Gold Rush: The first jeans

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (California Gold Rush mini-series, episode 245) is a short documentary about how jeans began. In 1853 Levi Strauss, a young man from Germany, arrived in San Francisco and sold cloth, clothes and other goods to shops in the West. Miners and other workers had a problem: they worked on their knees all day and filled their pockets with heavy stones and tools, so the pockets came apart. Jacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, Nevada, who bought his cloth from Levi Strauss, had an idea: small metal pins called rivets at the corners of the pockets. His customers loved the trousers, but he did not have the money to protect his idea, so the two men asked together for a patent, a paper that says an idea belongs to you. They got it in 1873 and started making the trousers in San Francisco, often in a strong blue cloth called denim. At first, people called them waist overalls, not jeans.

It is a listening comprehension episode in the past simple: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app, 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (tailor, rivets, patent). One "look closer" moment asks pupils to find the rivets on the pockets. The closing question (Why do you think the miners needed strong trousers?) can be answered from the video and opens a short talk about work clothes 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 (a portrait of Levi Strauss, a pair of old work jeans, the 1873 patent drawing), key words and the 10 questions; a one-page pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key are also included. Learners should know the past simple. The script explains its new words as it goes (tailor, rivets, patent, denim). No brand label is shown in the pictures.