NICOLAUS COPERNICUS - 550th BIRTHDAY

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Dear All,

The tulips above are for Nicolaus Copernicus, of course. Since Torun, Poland is my hometown, I feel obliged to share some great news with you. On 19^th February we celebrated the 550^th Birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus, a great astronomer and revolutionary scientist born in Toruń.

To mark the occasion, I’ve prepared some EFL tasks for students, following soft-CLIL assumptions. The seven tasks I wish to share with you are fairly generic and might be used with various levels and different age groups, apart from VYLs, I guess.

The integrated-skills tasks have been primarily designed for Polish EFL students and, therefore, the instructions are in Polish as most of the tasks I suggest might be a good springboard for exam preparation tasks.

· TASK 1: Use of English: multiple choice – read the text and fill in four gaps with the missing words. There are two extra words you don’t need to use.
· TASK 2: Grammar: building questions – on the basis of the text above, using the question words and answers, build the questions in the Past Simple Tense.
· TASK 3: Word-building and word families – jobs and fields of study, e.g. mathematician / mathematics. Fill in the gaps with the missing words.
· TASK 4: Listening comprehension – Watch a short biography of Copernicus and do two tasks: answer the questions on the basis of the content and tick the correct answer in the sentences. You may listen to the biography twice.
· TASK 5: Reading comprehension – read five paragraphs based on the facts from Copernicus’s life and match them with the headings. There is one extra text you don’t need to use.
· TASK 6: Listen to a song about the eight planets of the Solar System. Read through the characteristics of the planets and match them with each of the planets. You may draw a sketch of the Solar System, where you will be putting the information.
· TASK 7: Multiple-choice Quiz based on the language and content from the six previous tasks.

In the two attachments below, you’ll find the converted pptx file with the key and the materials I displayed in class as well as the handouts for your ss with all the tasks described above.

Enjoy your teaching and go Copernicus way!

Anita

References:

I built my tasks around and got my didactic inspiration from the following Internet sources: