Making Healthy Choices Podcast

Healthy Choices

For my ESOL activity, I would have the students listen to the podcast in the link above that talks about healthy eating for students. 

This would meet the following standards:

• Students learn how to listen and take notes on the podcast.
• Students learn about how there are different forms of electronic communication and how to listen to these sources.

In this activity, I would allow the podcast to be a lesson starter where I would play the podcast twice. Students would answer a simple question along with the podcast and take notes. Then, we would discuss how to help students make better eating choices. They would need to think of a way to encourage young children to eat fruits and vegetables as well as other health foods.

This would lead to a project and presentation where the students would need to create a week's menu that has a balanced diet. This would include foods from their culture as well as foods from American culture as well. At the end of the project, the students would get to present their menu and students would get to cook or bring in the healthy food for the class.

A Timeline of My Life

Click on the image to go to the website!

I decided to use Storybird to create a book of a timeline of my life. This would be a great activity for high school ESL students and it would meet the following high school standards:

• Using electronic forms to communicate about yourself
• Recognizing differences among various cultures.

For college admissions essays, students often have to either remark on a specific event of their life or  even an autobiography. It may be easier for the students to make a story book like this first and then use the idea from the story book to write their essay.

Therefore, it would be assessed by The New York Times rubric:

Therefore, the book would be a way for the students to prewrite for their eventual college admissions essay. I think this would be a great way to brainstorm ideas before the students take the time to write down all of their thoughts.

Using Animoto for Social Writing

This week, I used Animoto to write about My Journey to the Ocean. This type of photo story could address the following two standards for middle school students:

• Using an electronic form of social communication for writing about oneself.
• Applying self-monitoring and self-correcting strategies in communication.

 Our original directions for the project were to make a photo story of a minimum of four scenes using text and music to enhance the presentation. Therefore, my directions for a class assignment would be to explain a journey in their lives, whether it be the first time they came to America or visited a new place. They would need to use the phrase "I would" at least twice in their presentation.

 There would also be a part of the assignment where the students would comment on what they did well and what they could improve on for the next video. I would assess their videos with the following rubric:

I especially like this rubric because it is very clear to see what is expected out of the language component of the slides. They have to have a beginning, middle, end of their journey in order for the students to receive full credit.