ESL Health Literacy Resources

This is an excellent stand alone health literacy curriculum for high beginning to intermediate students and beyond. The student resource book and teacher's guide are available on LINCS. We love the photographs used in the student resource book. As we know, photographs are especially helpful for our beginning level learners to grasp new vocabulary and ideas. Also great is the variety of information provided from how to interact with the doctor's office to healthy food and lifestyle choices, they cover a lot of ground. Even if you just visit the Glossary and Index in the student resource book, you are sure to find something helpful.

This is a great resource. If you have ever done a web search for "body parts" and "images," I know you will appreciate this PowerPoint. This is a fantastic no prep lesson for anyone who has a laptop and digital projector. The PowerPoint has animations in place so you can show just the very detailed drawings first and prompt students to give answers before you reveal the name of the body part and use it in a sentence. Toward the end of the presentation there is a slide with the entire body shown with blanks, so you could project the image and have students fill in the answers on the board. In addition the final slides have some common ailments and the "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" song lyrics.

Queens Library in New York City has many great programs to help ESL learners. They have a ton of resources on their website, but the health literacy stuff is on the "English for Your Health" page. Here they have lesson plans, complete with student worksheets and additional resources like listening activities. They break their resources into beginning and intermediate, and you simply click on the listing you are interested in to view the complete lesson plans.

If you are working with intermediate or advanced students, you may find some useful charts, graphs, tables, and other Info-graphics on the Pennsylvania Department of Health website. There are many different resources here on dozens of topics. For instance, you can view a chart with the cost of a day of hospital care at every hospital in PA, sorted by county. To access this information, check out the "Health Statistics and Research" area.

For nationwide information, try the Centers for Disease Control. Again, there is an incredible amount of information available on this site, and in many different formats. We suggest starting with "Data and Statistics" under the "Diseases and Conditions" link at the top of the page. They also have excellent information for what is going right now, like week by week updates on the spread of flu. We put a few examples of these resources below,

Hope created this lesson plan to be used in her beginning level ESL classroom. It incorporates the body parts PowerPoint, which you can find a link for above.

It also makes use of images found in both the Queens Library and Staying Healthy resources. Hope used the images as flashcards.

To increase the size to a point where you can easily read the lesson, simply click on the picture to the left.

This lesson plan was a collaboration between two of our Beginning level teachers. They have included additional resources below.

The first set of images are from a PowerPoint presentation Chris created. The second set of images are dialogues to use in the classroom that Mary Jean created.

Both teachers advocate using these resources for role playing in the classroom to prepare students for actual medical appointment. Students in both classes gave very good feedback on the exercises and reported that the practice helped them communicate with their doctors.

This is a fantastic lesson plan that Hind came-up with for teaching the differences between prescription, OTC, and home remedies. She incorporated a lot of resources, which are mentioned in the lesson plan.

Hind also brought in some actual empty bottles and boxes, so her student could interact with some realia. We have included some images below that might be helpful to use if you don't have empty medicine bottles hanging around your home.

Eileen's lesson plan on flu awareness is interesting and comprehensive. It makes use of several resources, including an article from Easy English News. If you are teaching High Beginning to Advanced students and do not use Easy English News, I would strongly suggest you check it out because it is great.

Eileen also incorporated the CDC flu maps into her lesson to spark conversation about the current spread of the flu and to get students to try to predict what the situation would look like in coming weeks.

John, one of our EL/Civics teachers, wrote-up this lesson plan looking at the nutrition in a traditional Thanksgiving meal. This lesson incorporates aspects of US History, American culture, and health. John suggests using this lesson plan with higher level ESL students. He uses a nutrition hand-out from the US Department of Veterans Affairs to show portion sizes. The VA has a weight management program called Move! that you can check-out for more great resources.

For a variation on the lesson for lower level students, Hind suggested using the nutrition labels from two cereal boxes: one a high-sugar cereal marketed to children, and one more nutrient-rich cereal. After a brief introduction to some simple daily values, students can work in small groups to compare and contrast the cereals and decide which they would choose for their kids.

The staff of Catholic Charities ESL Services worked together to compile this information to share with each other and our friends in the ESL teaching community. If you have any requests, questions, suggestions, or comments you would like to share, please feel free to contact Sara Beck, ESL Services Program Manager.

Email: shbeck@cchbg.org