Reading for Life Lessons

Minnesota ABE Supplemental Services, Linda Strand, 2004-2005

And the Minnesota Literacy Council

Focus: Describing Symptoms (Reading for Life, volume 1, unit 7 – Medical)

Objectives: Learners will be able to describe symptoms of common illnesses and ailments.

Key Vocabulary: parts of the body, sore throat, cold, pain, to hurt, fever, to bleed, allergy, rash, stuffed up nose, runny nose, ache, pregnant, symptoms, flu, cough

Topics to Review: parts of the body

Materials: Any props you want for the acting part, cards with symptoms (either written out or in picture form)

Procedure:

Real-life application:

Warm up with a review of parts of the body. An easy way is to draw a picture of a person on the board. Draw lines pointing to different body parts. Students come up to the board one at a time to label a part and then hand off the marker to a classmate.

Use pictures or, if you are comfortable doing so, act to elicit a few symptoms. Some good ones to start with are headache, stomachache, sore throat, cough, fever, backache, runny nose. You may wish to use props to help give students some context. Elicit or teach each term as you act it out. Monitor students as they add the vocabulary to their notebooks.

How Often?: Have students write in their notebooks a column for often, sometimes and never. Give each student a symptom. Tell them to write it at the top of their page. Students should put a tally mark in the column that best describes how often they experience their symptom. Then they should ask every member of the class about that symptom, putting tally marks in the appropriate columns. They may use as much or as little language as they wish. At the end of the activity, compile all of the information on the board. Conduct a feedback session with students about their information. Do they consider themselves healthy?

Concentration: Make sets of cards that match written symptoms with pictures. Distribute a set to each group of 3 students. They shuffle the cards and lay them face down. Students take turns turning over 2 cards. If they turn over cards on which the written symptom matches the picture that is a match. They get to keep the cards and take another turn. If the cards do not match, the player turns them face down again and play passes to the next player.

Mime: Use one set of cards with the symptoms written out or in picture form. One student takes a card. He or she must act out that symptom so that the rest of the class can guess. 

Teach the sentence, “I have a _________.” Students can use this phrase to talk about their ailments.

Role play a short dialogue where a student calls in sick to work or talks to the doctor about his/her ailment.

Progress to Reading for Life, v.1 competency worksheets: Applicable worksheets: RFL v.1, unit 7

Progress to multiple-choice format activities: Some to be created by MLC – coming soon

Extensions: Some to be created by MLC – coming soon