A beautiful machine that perfectly represents the British Industrial Revolution.

I suggest making the students work first on a text that introduces the machine, and its place in History.

I have prepared 2 gapped texts, based on a text found on BBCi's website. There should be 2 groups in the class : each group gets one of the 2 gapped texts, and needs to ask the other group questions in order to find the missing data.

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gapped text 1 :: gapped text 2 :: full text (.doc format)

Once this Q&A is over, the students can watch the animation (there's a link on the index page, and they have the address on their worksheets).
Tell them to be very careful as to the details of the machine : I suggest letting them play the "construction" game which is great to understand better how it was built, and helps memorizing the names too.

Then, ask them to complete the illustration by memory. You may of course let them correct their productions by going back to the animation after a first attempt.

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illustration (black & white) :: Color version :: list of missing words

It is a good idea, once this is all over, to ask the students to write a paragraph explaining how the machine works (now that they have all the useful words...)