Food: The Common Thread

The class is getting larger! It actually more than doubled, and with 10-13 students a day we are at an excellent working size for really getting down to the business of learning English. We still happen to have only ladies in the class and I'm really looking forward to knowing each of them better. 
 
So, where did I leave off last week? Creating authentic learning experiences. We aren't going to sit here and just drill grammar, we need to actually use what we're learning. I am very lucky to have a co-teacher who leads the class on Wednesdays (I teach every Monday and she teaches every Wednesday) who has been teaching at Progreso Hispano for a number of years and has a good feel for the students.  The two of us emailed back and forth and after talking to our students we decided that a unit on food would be a good place to start.  
 
I LOVE talking about food! Fortunately, so do many of the ladies in the class.  This is an area that the students can apply right away — every day while deciding how to feed the family, and every week when out grocery shopping. Talking about eating and family rituals can lead to very animated discussions. Also important, is to discuss American nutrition. One of my fellow AU cohorts is creating an entire lesson on juice at the school where he teaches. That sounds odd at first, right?  But, think about it, you're in a country where you can't read the labels  — and you come across a couple different jugs of 'orange' juice.  You want your kids to get plenty of vitamin C! Well, you might be able to buy some 'Sunny D' for just a couple dollars while the others cost $5.00. The cost is pretty important to you...  and it LOOKS like orange juice. But is it?  How much real juice is there?  How much sugar? How much 'other' stuff that none of us can pronounce. Yes, when you look at it closely American foods can be really tricky.
 
We won't leave grammar out of it completely!  Did you ever think about how in English, some words are count nouns, and some aren't.  You can count apples, but you don't count 'breads'...1 breads, 2 breads...nope! But we do say loaves of bread. So many little nuances to learn!
 
So, we might do a mini-lesson on reading food labels in order to prepare a meal.  Now...I wonder if there are some local supermarkets we can walk to in order to do our comparison shopping?