Essential Health Literacy for Today's World
Plus a new personalized critical thinking exercise for vocabulary
Today's post content:
7 health literacy related exercises
5 critical thinking sentences exercises (A NEW Claude 3.7 assisted exercise)
2 listening exercises
2 pronunciation exercises
2 videos
Paid subscribers have access to download the complete materials at the end of the post. Please note that I sometimes update some materials after teaching them to a few classes. I have updated the downloadable materials from last weeks' Data Literacy post as I edited some exercises and added a few new ones.
This health and wellness lesson has been developed, fine-tuned, and re-engineered over the years, especially in the last year with the assistance of AI. Previously, I never had the means or the time to eliminate a number of small defects until now. Additionally, it now includes a completely new personalized critical thinking exercise, making it very enjoyable to teach.
Health literacy has never been more essential in today's world due to events that have increased pandemic awareness and the proliferation of new technologies. These include fitness tracking apps, online health platforms, social media and wearable devices that monitor vital signs in real-time.
Common Health Problems Visual Vocabulary
This is an older, but always successful way to start a class. By matching common symptoms and conditions to images, students learn/review vocabulary necessary for engaging in healthcare conversations —skills increasingly vital in the health-conscious 2020s.
Health Problems Listening
Reinforcing the vocabulary above, this listening exercise consists of medically related dialogues that reflect the way people actually communicate about their health. By matching spoken descriptions to visual cues, learners develop comprehension skills needed for medical settings. This is an older exercise with improved layout.
Health Problems Collocations
When talking about illness, symptoms, and treatment we say "have" a headache rather than "feel" a headache, or that a virus is "contagious" rather than "spreading." These word combinations appear everywhere from medical forms to conversations with doctors and pharmacists.
Verbs-Noun Combinations for Health, Wellness and Treatment
Medical language isn't just for doctors anymore. We all need to understand healthcare terms when we visit hospitals, read medicine instructions, or discuss symptoms with professionals. From "diagnosing" conditions to "monitoring" vital signs, this listening/vocabulary exercise focuses on a set of verb-noun combinations commonly used for talking about wellness and treatment. This exercise is also an older one with improved clarity and layout. Students have to match a verb and a noun for each item.
Critical Thinking Sentences (CTS) for Verbs for Medical Treatment (or Verbs for Health and Wellness!)
This exercise involves giving a student a set of the target vocabulary and an example sentence. The rationale behind the exercise is that it helps learners not just memorize terms but actually internalize and apply them through personal connections. This type of exercise supports deeper learning and better retention of vocabulary while developing critical thinking skills.
The example sentence is an example and a guide. The student then creates their own sentence for their own life experience. I used to use this exercise with quite a lot of success. But I guess I stopped using it as I became a bit annoyed having to create example sentences. Now, I have rediscovered this exercise, and with the assistance of AI to do the annoying bit, it's more interesting than before.
This specific exercise builds critical thinking and vocabulary skills by having students create personal sentences using medical treatment related verbs (they can also be described as "health and wellness" verbs if we want to use trendy 2020s terminology). When students use words like "monitor" or "diagnose" to talk about their own experiences, they understand these terms more deeply and remember them better. I have included other examples in the subscriber section at the bottom of this post.
I have included more of these exercises in the paid subscriber section including the topics : Soft Skills, Artificial Intelligence, Consumer Experience and Data Literacy.