Forest Detectives – What happened to the forest?

CLIL teaching material for primary school, grade 4

CLIL stands for Content and Language Integrated Learning. In CLIL, a school subject is taught partly or entirely in a foreign language. The focus is on the subject content, and the language serves as a tool. This way, children pick up English along the way, without the pressure of having to speak it perfectly.

What happens to a forest when it burns, and how does it recover afterwards? In this bilingual lesson, a tree stump tells its story: from a healthy forest, through a forest fire, to the slow return of nature. The children become “Forest Detectives” and discover that forests can change and heal again.

The lesson takes about 45 minutes and is taught roughly 90% in English. Pictures, flashcards and story cards help the children grasp the content even without understanding every word. The material fits the Saxon primary school curricula for General Studies and English as well as the Czech Framework Curriculum (RVP ZV). It offers two levels of differentiation and can be used with or without a projector.

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This material was developed within the project TransForMon (“Cross-border forest monitoring in the Bohemian Switzerland/Saxon Switzerland National Park”). The partners are Charles University in Prague, TU Dresden and the national park authorities of both countries. The project is funded by the INTERREG Saxony–Czech Republic 2021–2027 programme and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. You are free to use, adapt and share the material, provided you give appropriate credit and distribute any adaptations under the same licence.