Reading comprehension skills: The Smiths' diet

To improve our students reading skills can be motivating if we find topics that are connected to their personal lives and interests. Although some students might not feel like reading, we can engage students by offering them short texts rich in vocabulary and useful expressions that can be understandable by context.  

As all reading comprehension activities we need to prepare a pre-work in order to facilitate students the correct guidelines to achieve the task objectives. For this reading, The Smiths' diet we suggest the following steps:

1 - Before the reading task: 

A match up vocabulary task with Wordwall can be useful to warming up. Students need to contextualise the activity before fully enter into the main reading. 


Match up vocabulary: "The Smiths' diet"



2 - During the reading task:

Ask your students to read carefully the text, they should find new vocabulary that they can find it looking up in an on-line English to Spanish dictionary, as per example the one offered by Cambridge:  


To remember the new vocabulary they should build up a vocabulary list with all the new words learned.

Now, let's start with the reading:

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The Smiths' diet:

My name is Vicky Smith, I am 15 years-old and every Saturday I like to go with my younger brother, Paul and my parents, Sally and Víctor  to the supermarket because my brother and I like to push the shopping cart along the alleys and look for the sale products of the week.  Our cart is always full of healthy products because we keep a balance diet at home, our refrigerator is full of zero-mile which are local products picked just at their right point of maturation and immediately placed to sale on the market, are fresher and testier.  

My mom is a vegetarian and my dad is a vegan, that is that neither of them eat mean or fish. But there is a big difference although both of them eat vegetables, fruit, nuts and grains, vegans do not eat any product derived from animals. Our home smells like fresh tomatoes, potatoes, carrots and zucchinis and seasonal fruits. 
 
My brother and I are also vegetarians and we keep healthy and fit. Besides vegetables we like to eat many different fruits like apples, oranges, pears and bananas. My brother and I like to prepare fresh fruit juice using a blender. We also like dairy products rich on calcium, which is a essential mineral for the bones formation. 

Although most of our family members are vegetarians, my grandfather and grandmother stick to the Mediterranean diet that consist in foods such as vegetables, fruits, fish, meat, olive oil, nuts, grains and dairy such as yogurt and cheeses. 

As the Smiths' family we all have food that we like the most and that we do not like at all. Write a comment on to this post describing the content of your refrigerator at home and share it will all your mates. 


3 - After the reading task:  

At this point your students should have worked with text, it is time to make some questions about their reading comprehension skills. To make sure that they have worked on the expected objectives, we propose two different tasks:

One task will consist on the completion of a questionnaire designed with Google Forms  using also the assistance of Twee (Artificial Intelligence) https://app.twee.com/  (Teachers!! make sure you revise the questions and answers build by the AI programme before posting them, it is possible that some need modifications or clarifications to be correct. Lucky us, that at this point artificial intelligence can help us but substitute us!!.) To share the access it is quite stimulating the use of the QC for students to use their mobile phones to answer the questionnaire: 



However, you may also use the link to the questionnaire that way we can make sure that all students have access to the assignment:

Answer the following questions about the reading


The other task has a sort of interaction perspective, to complete the reading comprehension activitiy we have to make sure that each student to write a comment post describing the content of their refrigerativo at home. 
 


References: 
Wordwall. (nd). https://wordwall.net/es
Google Forms. (nd). https://forms.google.com/
Twee beta. (nd). https://app.twee.com/




Comments

  1. InmaMay 20, 2023 at 12:32 AM

    In our refrigerator, we have plenty of fruits and vegetables, yogurts and milk. Sometimes we have fresh cheese and chocolate. My dad likes dark chocolate and we like milk-chocolate with nuts.
    My favourite fruits are strawberries and peaches, but we do not always have in the refrigerator.
    We also have sauerkraut which is fermented cabbage that my dad buys at the Russian supermarket.

    ReplyDelete

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