Health Lessons from the Minnesota Literacy Council

The MLC has wealth of English teaching resources on its website.  Check out their Health Lessons for Volunteers. The pacing is fast (3 weeks to cover lots of information).  Those working with beginners will likely want to spend more time covering the themes and activities here.

Need a free, health expert to present to your class?

http://www.echominnesota.org/

ECHO (Emergency and Community Health Outreach) Minnesota has an extensive collection of health related videos specifically geared toward immigrants and refugees. These programs run 30 to 60 minutes and are available in accessible English as well as many of the immigrants' first languages including: Spanish, Somali, Hmong, Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, and others. If you are taking on a health topic with your ELL adult student, check ECHO's archive for the "expert presentation" that will best suit your needs.

I Hate the New Food Pyramid

Many of the students I have worked with in health literacy classes are refugees and immigrants for whom the idea of a food pyramid is completely new. Unfortunately, the new food pyramid fails to make its messages clear. When talking to these students about relative amounts of food from each group, I prefer to use pie charts like the one pictured here. I project the image on the wall. Then I have students write each food they ate at their last meal on a post-it (one food item per post-it and for true beginners, I encourage pictures) and then stick each note onto the projected image in the correct food group. I revisit this idea when we plan our pot lucks. Students write and post the dishes they intend to bring the week beforehand. Then we work as a group to determine if we have a healthy mix of foods and make adjustments. We also discuss how we would change the mix of foods for a group of diabetics or for a group with other chronic diseases we have discussed in class.

Nutrition Lesson Ideas

Here's a sample of lesson objectives and resources that can help students understand healthy food choices while building language skills.

Keep objectives simple. Students who participate in a nutrition unit might do one (or more, but one is fine) of the following...

1. Identify foods from each food group (Grains, Milk, Meat/Protein, Fruits/Vegetables, Fats/Oils/Sweets)

2. Categorize foods as carbohydrate/ not carbohydrate

3. Identify appropriate serving sizes for each food group

4. Answer questions using food labels

a. Regarding sodium/ salt

b. Regarding carbohydrate/ sugar

Curriculum Resources

Staying Healthy Chapter 4 FREE

Picture Stories Story 8: Snack Attack FREE

Heart Health ESL Curriculum Resource: Chapters E and F FREE

North Carolina Curriculum Guide Lesson Topic Nutrition FREE

ESL SALSA FREE

Health Stories several lessons in all three series’ books relate to nutrition and the content objectives. (available from New Readers Press. Cost is less than $10.00 per book.)

Health Literacy Redefined

Last week at the 8th annual Health Literacy conference put on by the Institute for Health Care Advancement, I first heard a new proposed definition of health literacy that I am intending to use.

“Health literacy allows the public and personnel working in health-related contexts to find, understand, evaluate, communicate and use information.”

This definition really underscores the importance of skills (be they oral English, reading abilities, abilities to speak Plain Language, etc.) on the part of all parties (patients, providers, health educators) involved in communication and decisions about health. Andrew Pleasant and colleagues suggest that future work in the field of health literacy underscore the shared roles of patients and providers.

Human Body: Funky writing and vocabulary resources for ELLs

The Human Body features on the Barbican Centre's Can I Have a Word? site include great poetry-generating activities that would make for superb writing and vocabulary activities for more advanced ELL adults. The site features a very funky animated poem about the body. Check it out! (under "Stimulate")

Even more useful in ELL classrooms are the poetry building activities that really help students stretch their descriptive abilities related to how human bodies look and feel...skills important in communication between patients and health care providers.Go to http://www.barbican.org.uk/canihaveaword/, click on Human Body then click on the link under "Create" and download "Worksheets and Poems". FREE

General ELL Health Literacy Resource-FREE

As a program coordinator for a community literacy center with a limited budget (serving students whose budgets are often even more limited), I am always excited when I find good, FREE resources for ELL literacy tutors and their students. This is one.

Staying Healthy, a health literacy curriculum for ELLs, was published by the Florida Literacy Coalition last year. This is a great, comprehensive, basic health literacy curriculum.

I have found the units on doctor visits and medications particularly good useful in my classes. The literacy tutors I work with are impressed by the strategic use of good graphics throughout this resource. The unit on chronic disease is not sufficient to stand alone, but provides a good springboard to further discussion.