Helping others: The RNLI lifeboats

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Helping others mini-series, episode 43) is a short documentary about the RNLI, the charity that runs most of the lifeboats in the UK and Ireland. It opens on a baker whose pager tells her that her lifeboat crew must go now. Almost all the crews are volunteers with ordinary jobs: they train a lot, learn first aid, and go out in the day and at night to help people in danger at sea. The RNLI started in 1824; today it has more than two hundred and thirty lifeboat stations, and its crews have saved more than one hundred and forty thousand lives. The narration uses the present simple, with the present continuous at the start (A baker is making bread) and one present perfect (its crews have saved); 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 (lifeboat and volunteer). The study topic is people who give their time to help others.

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 (a pager, a lifeboat at sea, crew with first aid bags), 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 leave your work to help a stranger at sea? Why, or why not?). Learners should know the present simple and be able to read dates and large numbers such as one hundred and forty thousand. The pack's key words explain the new words (pager, apron, lifeboat, crew, charity, volunteer, first aid, stranger).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.