It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, I feel like an educational miracle worker or at least an educational genius. One year, the science and health/PE teachers came to me and said the ELLs were struggling with the cross-curricular unit they were teaching about nutrition. They asked me to do something to help them.

Every day, for the first five days of the unit, students kept a food journal, recording everything they ate and drank during the five days. This journal later becomes the pre-writing for a reflective essay about their food choices (helping out the ELA teacher). Also, on day one, we practiced food vocabulary (my language objectives). First, we used the cards from Appetizing Adjectives: The Board Game to classify foods by their food group (helping the science and PE teachers) with a pocket chart. I labeled each section of the chart with a food group, and students took turns drawing a card and placing it in the correct pocket. Prior to class, I made up a poster-sized food pyramid for each pair of students and gathered grocery ads. After the whole group practice, the students cut pictures from the ads and glued them into the correct sections of the pyramid, labeling them with their names. This activity is similar to the food quilts I’ve done as part of my appetizing adjectives lesson, but rather than focusing on adjectives, we focused on the vocabulary of food categories (dairy, grain, meat, etc.).

On day two, I reminded students to continue completing their food journals, and we expanded our vocabulary practice to include quantifiers (more language acquisition objectives). After reviewing the relevant vocabulary, we played two different games. The first, from ESL Galaxy, asks students to name a food that matches the quantifier of the space on which they land. For the second game, we again used Appetizing Adjectives: The Board Game. This time, when a student drew a card, he/she named the quantifier that would go with the food on the card (a head of broccoli, a bunch of bananas).

For this day, I used a couple of resources from Nourish Interactive. We used the food group healthy serving size sheet and the food group servings and amounts sheet to discuss portion/serving sizes and how they relate to the food pyramid/plate. After discussing this, we used paper plates and a

Now that students better understood what it means to eat in a healthy manner, it was time to start applying this knowledge. We used the government’s MyPlate Plan online activity to develop a personalized eating plan. They then used the graphic organizer to decide what they would eat each day for an entire week. I told them not to worry about specific ingredients but to pay attention to portion size and the serving guidelines we learned about the day before.

I hadn’t forgotten about the math teacher’s request, and on day five, we started to do some math. First, we reviewed the percentage formula (number of servings divided by the total servings for the day/week multiplied by one hundred). Then, students determined what percentage of their daily servings should come from each food group. They then transferred the meal plan they made in the previous lesson to a MyPlate graphic organizer, listing the food and the number of servings. Finally, they determined what percentage of their servings came from each food group and compared it with the government recommendations. The students required a fair amount of support at first, but by the end, they were getting quite good at using the formula.

I had warned students ahead of time that we would be doing this project so they could ask their families for recipes and come prepared with an idea of what groceries they would need to put on their lists. Before beginning work, I told students that they would not need to buy certain basic supplies (flour, sugar, spices, oil, and butter) because they were “already in the kitchen.” Students then used their meal plan to create a grocery

On the final day of our unit, I wanted to practice percentages again. I asked students to figure out what percentage of their budget they spent on each food group. They used their grocery shopping list to help them get organized and underlined each item with a different color of pencil based on the food groups. They then did the math to figure out the total spent on food from each group and recorded it in the graphic organizer. After this, they figured out the percentage of their budget spent on each food group. We even snuck in some graph-making practice by creating a circle graph to represent their budgets visually!