Monkeypox

With this ESL lesson plan students learn about monkeypox, and more broadly about viruses. They learn essential vocabulary and talk about symptoms, treatment and vaccination.

The lesson starts with a few conversation questions about common diseases (measles, mumps, hepatitis). Students share what they know about each one, talk about vaccination and other public health achievements.

Vocabulary: Students learn common symptoms (e.g. rash, swollen glands, fever) and use them to describe the diseases from activity one. In the next activity, students learn about viruses and complete the sentences with useful vocabulary (e.g. spread, outbreak, strain, epidemic).

Pre-listening and video: Students complete a few questions with the words and phrases they have just learned and then watch a video “What is monkeypox and how dangerous is it” in order to find the answer to the questions. Finally, students discuss the video and answer a few more questions related to monkeypox and more broadly to viruses and diseases.
The set of conversation cards is a great way to review the target vocabulary of this lesson as well as to teach a conversation class. The Interactive PDF will make it easy to teach this lesson in an online setting.

This lesson will work great in combination with the worksheet “Phrasal verbs: health”.

Other health-related lessons that could be taught before or after this lesson are: “The importance of good posture”, “What happens to your brain when you have a concussion?”, “Video calls and cosmetic surgery”