the-blue-whale-lesson-plan.pdf
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A few years ago I was given the BBC’s The Blue Planet DVD box set for Christmas. This 8-part nature documentary of life in the oceans marked the beginning of my career as an armchair naturalist and during the next few months, my world was taken over by humpback whales and bottlenose dolphins. All this came at the expense of seeing nothing but the colour blue and swirling vortices of fish when I closed my eyes in bed at night.

Inevitably, the series also found its way into my lesson planning. The first scene of the first episode, for example, proved very popular with my students. In it we are presented with an aerial view of the “biggest animal which has ever lived on our planet” as well as a series of facts relating to it which would surely raise a few skeptical eyebrows were it not for the fact that the narrator is David Attenborough.

This scene has found its way onto YouTube and this makes it worthwhile for me to share my lesson plan (see pdf file above). However, the clip has surely been posted illegally and this presents me with a moral dilemma.

The Blue Planet series elegantly combines entertainment with education and such resources are invaluable for the classroom. Ideally, any school or institution that intends to make use of the series should make a point of buying it. But for the lone teacher, I feel that the use of clips like these can, to an extent, be justified for educational purposes.

The aim of the lesson is for students to acquire the language necessary for describing size, weight, height, speed, length, width, etc while learning about the blue whale. The pdf file contains the lesson plan, worksheets and flashcards. You will also need the above YouTube clip as well as acess to the blue whale’s song (examples can be heard here).

Posted by admin on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 3:29 pm.