ED3561/Fall 2000

Multidimensional ESL Unit

Renata Krasowski

Field of experience: Food

Topics to be developed:

Food awareness

Ethnic and Canadian cooking

Experiential goal: The students will produce a menu brochure for a meal of their choice. The menu will consist of three dishes. The students will speak to their selection of dishes.

Grade: 7 – 9

Language level: lower intermediate

Steps to Follow:

Step 1: The students will be able to name the main food groups: meat and meat products, fruit and vegetables and dairy products.

Step 2: The students will be able to name cooking utensils

Step 3: The students will discuss nutritious needs of people

Step 4: The students will be able to interpret measurements in food recipes

Step 5: The students will identify food from different parts of the world

Step 6: The students will tell about their favourite dish

Step 7: The students will create lists of dishes appropriate for various occasions

Step 8: The students will hand in their projects (menu brochure) and present them to the class

Objectives:

Communicative: Students will be able to exchange information and ideas on their culinary habits, preferences and abilities. They will be able to tell about nutritious value of foods. They will be able to discuss cultural differences in food.

Cultural: Students will examine Canadian and other nations’ cuisines.

Language: Students will apply a variety of "food preparation and consumption" verbs, (e.g. cook, roast, boil, cut, chop, sieve, set, grill, slice, taste) and correctly use the present tense.

General Language: The students will identify and interpret food measurements when following recipes. The students will use a dictionary to find definitions of unknown ingredients.

Lesson 1

Title: Food groups used in our kitchens

Materials: a video, picture dictionary, paper and pen

Preparation: The teacher tells the students the topic and objective of the lesson.

  1. The teacher shows a video clip "In the supermarket" where the camera focuses on various food sections.
  2. The students are brainstorming telling the teacher the names of different foods they saw in the video. The teacher writes the words on the board. The teacher may complete the list with some foods that have not been mentioned and show them to the students in a picture dictionary.
  3. The teacher explains how different foods could be grouped into three food categories: meat and meat products, fruit and vegetables, and milk and milk products. The students are then divided into three groups and each group is supposed to place appropriate foods into the food category that they are given. After this is done, volunteers from each group go and write the food names on the board in the appropriate food group column.
  4. Writing activity: students are asked to write two sentences about a food they choose without mentioning its name. Volunteers then read their descriptions to the rest of the class to guess what food they are describing.

Lesson 2

Title: Cooking utensils

Materials: variety of cooking utensils, scarf for the blindfolding game, paper and pen

Recap of the previous lesson:

The teacher asks the students to finish the sentence starting with: "Wieners [other foods] belong to _______". The students are supposed to fill in the food group the food belongs to.

Preparation: The teacher tells the students that they will learn the names of cooking utensils today. He/she has brought a variety of cooking utensils to the classroom and has displayed them unlabelled on four tables.

  1. The students are divided into four groups and each given a handout with pictures and names of different utensils. Each group is then assigned one table and the students need to find the names of the utensils on their table, write their names and label each utensil.
  2. The teachers picks up a utensil from a table, shows it to the class and reads its name. The students repeat the names.
  3. "Feel the object" game – can be done in pairs or groups. One student gets blindfolded and is given a utensil that his partner or group chose. (No sharp or otherwise dangerous utensils are used in the activity.) The blindfolded student is to tell the name of the utensil he/she is holding. His partner(s) ask: " How do you know this is ___? " The student describes physical characteristics that prompted his guess: "Because it’s round (thin, smooth, rough, heavy, feels like metal, etc.)"

Lesson 6

Topic: My favourite dish

Materials: booklets of food recipes that had been brought by the students

Preparation: This step requires the students to bring a recipe of the dish that they like and that is made in their home some time prior to the lesson. This can be a main dish, a salad, entrée, anything they want. The teacher has the recipes typed, and assembled into a booklet.

  1. The teacher asks the students to tell which are the most common ingredients in their native country or the part of the world they come from (this has been learned in step 5). This information is written on the board.
  2. The class is put into groups and each group gets a booklet with the student recipes and has a task to identify the origin of the two recipes they were assigned. The students are trying to tell which part of the world the recipe comes from and which of their classmates’ dish this could be.
  3. The spokesperson for each group tells the class what they have found out.
  4. The students sit in a circle and each tells the class which their dish is and why they like it.

Assessment techniques:

  1. Journal (the students will start recording after the first three lessons)
  2. The students will be asked to write a journal entry in class for four days every morning. In the journal they will record what they have eaten for breakfast that day. They students will also be expected to make a comment on nutritious value of their meals.

    The journal will be evaluated for information content and grammatical accuracy and feedback given to individual students orally during a session with the teacher.

  3. Questionnaire (to be administered orally)
  4. The students work in pairs to find out the information asked for in the questionnaire.

    Sample questions:

    What foods does your mother/father buy when they go grocery shopping?

    What are various food items used for?

    Tell about your eating habits. Have they changed lately?

    What is your favourite dish? What ingredients do you need for it?

    Can you prepare any dish? What? What utensils do you need for it?

    What is served in your home at a dinner party?

    What would you serve if you prepared a party for your friends? Why?

    What ethnic dishes other than your own have you tried? Did you like them?

    Why/why not?

    Which do you eat more often, rice or bread?

    Evaluation criteria:

    Giving pertinent information

    Using vocabulary learned in the unit

    Elaborating on questions (going beyond a basic answer)

    Fluency and grammatical accuracy

  5. Final project and its presentation

The students will introduce their dishes by telling about their nutritious values, ways of preparation and indicating what ethnic cuisine the dishes represent. A letter grade will be assigned based on meeting the four major objectives of the unit.

Resources:

Richard-Amato, Patricia. Making It Happen

Canada Food Guide

Cooking presentation video (Julia Child or other)

MOCAP

Web sites, for example:

http://www.manythings.org/c/hm-food-drink.cgi (hangman game on foods)

http://www.aitech.ac.jp/ iteslj/questions/ (Conversation questions: food and

eating)

http://www.eslpartyland.com/quiz%20center/foodcrossc.htm (crossword puzzle

on food quantifiers)

 

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