A DOCUMENTARY LESSON: MY WAY TO SCHOOL

OBJECTIVE: speaking about everyday life, a documentary

SKILLS: listening, speaking, writing

GRAMMAR: present simple and present continuous tense

VOCABULARY: (depends on the documentary you use: transport, clothes, weather, nature, school)

ADDED VALUE OF THE PROJECT: students learn about everyday lives of their peers abroad from real situations and people and raising awareness about how similar children's lives are no matter where they live J

1. Write on the board for students to copy in their notebooks the questions regarding documentaries:

   What do I know? (it's about real life, people, a camera...)

   What do I think I know? (France, Lummiere...)

   What do I want to know? (the first documentary, where can I study film art)

2. Give your students some time to write the answers. When they have finished discuss their answers with the whole class.

3. A DOCUMENTARY: the first documentaries were called „actuality films“ (a train entering a station https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk) the word documentary was coined in 1926.

   Ask your students which word is „hiding“ in the word „documentary“ – „document“. What does it tell us about the documentaries? (documents have to be true and so do the documentaries, they are nonfictional) Ask if they have ever watched a documentary and what it was about? What can a documentary be about (animals, nature, people, factories, schools, history...)

4. Tell them that they are going to watch a documentary/ documentaries about the way to school and ask what they think they will see (How do the students go to school? How much time do they need to get to school? What do they talk about on their way to school?)

5. After watching ask students who made the documentary and what the person was talking about. Could they see what they thought they would see? Then start asking questions like: How many students are playing football? What colour is the school building? Which flags are in the school corridor? What is the girl wearing? Who could you see in the gym? How many people are there in the gym? What are they doing? What's the weather like? What noises can you hear? Where is the school (in the village or in the country)? You can adapt the questions according to the documentary you want to use.

6. Watch the documentary again and pause it in order to answer the questions and discuss whether the students were right or wrong in their answers or how close they were in their assumptions.

7. Discuss with your students how similar or different the ways to schools are from theirs.

8. Homework: you can ask your students to write a passage using the answers (you can put it on your school website or in the school newspapers) or maybe even make their own first documentary in English J

    

    

    

   If you like this lesson, you can take it from here :)