Out and about in Europe - self-isolating solution!

My young learner student has been reading Heidi - a graded reader version. We've enjoyed the story, and talked about friendship & jealousy, healthy lifestyles and loneliness. We also learned a lot of good new vocabulary - there's a Quizlet set for this particular version of the story (OUP Dominoes series) right here. Tip for teachers or any creative types out there, the Pro version is free for the time-being. Get into it!

One of the projects for after reading, was to read up about the Matterhorn and fill in a table with data about the mountain and its location etc. Good detective work, focusing on detail.

But the funky part was GOING there, having a look around and describing what we could see. How can we do that, with only an hour together in our classroom, not to mention the lack of flights/inability to travel around Europe at the moment...? Hello Google Expeditions! Popped my phone into a cardboard viewer (cheap but does the job!) and "Wow, it's beautiful!" from my quiet little learner. As she swiveled around taking in the 360 view, prompts galore:

• Can you see any people? What are they doing?
• How's the weather? What season is it?
• What's behind you? Can you read the sign, please?
• What's under your feet? Is it easy to walk here? Why/why not?
• What clothes do you need to go for a walk here?
• What would you put in your bag?
• How are you feeling, if you walk up here?
• Who would you like to visit here with? Why?
• Are there places like this where you live? Which is colder?
• What would you do after this walk?

Follow up projects to this could be:

• sending a postcard (real, or imaginary eg from Heidi to friend in Frankfurt) - good opportunity to use a variety of tenses...what you did yesterday, what you are doing now, what your plans are for tomorrow or the weekend.
• Do some research on another mountain, nearer to home (for us, Mount Fuji was the obvious candidate) and make a nice poster, exploiting some key new vocabulary eg summit, ridge, volcano. Get funky with an app to make it a digital one?

We also decided to compare two towns near the Matterhorn, Zermatt in Switzerland and Cervinio in Italy, strolling around in Google Maps, using Street View. We talked about the different kinds of shops and what we could buy, which was safer to walk around (Zermatt has no cars!), if people were dressed the same, where a group of kids might be going etc. And which we would like to visit, when we can travel more freely again (and which looked like the nicest hotel!).

So, gentle reader - send us your (isolated) review of a mountain large in your life, and let us post it here as well?