Superfoods

With this engaging intermediate ESL lesson students will enrich their vocabulary about food and healthy eating. They will discuss their eating habits. superfoods and how to incorporate healthy foods in their diets. You can combine it with the worksheet “Idioms: eating and drinking”.

After an initial discussion, students look at a few sentences which introduce a few phrases about eating and diets (e.g. balanced diet, a pick-me-up, have a sweet tooth, staple food). They work out the meaning of the expressions from context and match them to their definitions. Then they complete a few questions with the newly-learned expressions and ask and answer the questions.

Superfoods vocabulary: Students are given photos of common superfoods, organised by food groups and are asked to match the food to the correct photo (e.g. kale, chard, chia seeds, pumpkin seeds, seaweed, açaí berries, goji berries). Then they talk about the foods they are familiar with, the foods that are already part of their diets and which ones they would like to try.

Reading: Students read a short text about 4 superfoods and guess which are the foods described. From there, they learn expressions used to talk about health benefits of food (e.g. to be packed with, to be loaded with, can boost, can lower). They used these expressions as well as the expressions from the first vocabulary activity in a role-play.

Video: Students watch a video “What people get wrong about superfoods” and answer 6 questions in their own words. After that, they discuss the video and a few more questions about superfoods. To conclude the lesson, students work in pairs and brainstorm ways to incorporate 3 healthy foods in their diets.

The conversation cards serve as an additional practice as well as a way to revise the target vocabulary from this lesson at a later stage.

This lesson can be combined with other food and drinks-related lesson plans, such as “Stop food waste” and “The surging sales of non-alcoholic drinks“