Ireland: St Patrick's Day

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Ireland mini-series, episode 133) is a short documentary about St Patrick's Day. Every year in March, a river in the middle of Chicago, in the USA, turns bright green. St Patrick's Day, on 17 March, is Ireland's national day and a holiday in Ireland; Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, and people say that he died on 17 March. Many Irish people moved to the USA, Britain, Canada and Australia and took the day with them, and today millions of people around the world have Irish families. People wear green and sometimes a shamrock, and there are big parades: hundreds of thousands of people watch in Dublin, and the New York parade started in 1762. In Chicago, plumbers first used a green dye in the 1960s to find where dirty water came into the river; in 1962 they had the idea of making the whole river green. Today two boats put a secret orange powder in the river, and it stays bright green for a few hours. Since 2010, famous buildings around the world also turn green, like the Sydney Opera House. The narration is in the present simple, with the past simple for the history; no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 9 on facts and 1 on vocabulary (shamrock). The study topic is Ireland: its traditions and places, 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 photo of the green Chicago River, a drawing of the plumbers making the river green in 1962, a photo of pipers in the New York parade), 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 see the green river in Chicago? Why, or why not?). Learners should know the present simple and the past simple of common verbs and be able to read dates. The pack's key words explain the new words (national, holiday, patron saint, shamrock, leaf, parade, plumber, dye, dirty, powder, mix).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre") and ireland (4e axis 6, "L'Irlande"), Cycle 4 (4e). The episode targets CEFR level A2+.