The Mississippi: What is the Mississippi?

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (Mississippi mini-series, episode 11) is a short documentary that answers one question: where does the Mississippi River start, and where does it end? A single narrator starts at Lake Itasca, in Minnesota, where the river is only about five metres wide and people can walk across it on the rocks. The river then goes south through the middle of the USA, other rivers join it, and it passes ten states and big cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans before it goes into the sea in the Gulf of Mexico. The script gives its length (about 3,700 kilometres, more than three times as long as the Loire) and says that a drop of water takes about three months to get to the sea. The language is present simple, can and the comparison three times as long as, with vocabulary for directions, size and large numbers. Learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (stream, join, drop). The study topic is the Mississippi River in the USA.

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script. Each pack is a one-page PDF with the text, three photos, the key words and the 10 questions: a pupil pack, and a teacher pack with the answers highlighted. It also has a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key. It has no lesson plan. Play the episode twice, hand out the pupil pack, then ask the closing question (where does the Mississippi start, and where does it end?) and let learners answer from the text. Learners should know river, north and south, and be able to read large numbers such as 3,700 kilometres.

Curriculum alignment

Tagged countries-and-landscapes (6e, "Pays et paysages", Cycle 3). The episode targets CEFR level A1+.