Dear Colleagues:
As part of National Nutrition Month, the LINCS Health Literacy group is looking at nutrition resources for adult learners. Yesterday, I mentioned that some resources combine health literacy with college and career readiness standards or integrate multiple content areas at the secondary level. Below is a description of a particularly powerful and well written unit. I'm including the LINCS Reading and Writing group because, while there is a considerable amount of mathematics content, there is a strong focus on English Language Arts.
Primary Source Exemplar: Nutrition and Human Rights by Joanna Schimizzi is a new addition to the Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons. The unit is written for high school-level students and combines English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies. While ambitious and challenging, the author provides detailed suggestions for adapting each lesson for English language learners, students with disabilities, and students reading below grade level. Often Schimizzi suggests focusing in on one or two key paragraphs or one graph in a primarily source or provides links to engaging animations and Ted Talks on the topic for scaffolding. Here are the lessons:
- Lesson #1: What do you eat? – Making a diet journal and interpreting information from a database
- Lesson #2: Why do you eat? – Interpreting Primary Sources and Writing Claims about Diet and Nutrition
- Lesson #3: Are all foods equal? – Interpreting Primary Sources and Writing Claims about Nutritional Strategies
- Lesson #4: How is access to food a Human Right? – Interpreting a Primary Source
- Lesson #5: What are barriers to Appropriate and Equitable Nutrition? – Researching for Primary Sources
- Lesson #6: How do changes in the human food supply affect the rest of the ecosystem?
This very dense unit takes a bit of time to review but I think you will find it is worth it. What can we take from this unit? What do you find? Should we do a Study Circle on this unit?
Cynthia
Health Literacy Moderator
Technical issue: I found it easiest to download the PDF version but I needed to log in to the OER Commons. Using the OER Commons is free and the registration is simple.