Into the ice: Finding the Endurance

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Into the ice mini-series, episode 56) is a short documentary about the search for the Endurance, the ship that sank in the Weddell Sea in 1915. For more than a hundred years nobody knew where it was; the captain, Frank Worsley, had written down the place. In February 2022 a team left Cape Town on an icebreaker, the S.A. Agulhas II, and used underwater robots to take pictures of the sea floor. On 5 March 2022 they found the ship, standing up and in very good condition, three thousand and eight metres down; its name can still be read on the back. The wreck is protected: people can film it, but nobody can touch it. The narration uses the present simple and the past simple, with one passive (The wreck is protected); 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 (icebreaker and protected). The study topic is explorers and life in the polar ice, 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 photos (the Endurance under full sail in 1915, the icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II, the back of the wreck with its name), 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 like to look for an old ship under the sea?). Learners should know the present simple and the past simple, and be able to read dates and large numbers such as three thousand and eight. The pack's key words explain the new words (deep, captain, explorer, scientist, notes, icebreaker, robot, sea floor, condition, protect, touch, film).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-travel-and-migration ("Voyages et migrations"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.