Unfortunately, obesity is one of the most pressing problems of our time and students should be more aware of how their eating habits can affect their future lives. That’s why I have decided to organise a debate night with my C2 level students next week. The topic of our debate will be: “Are we a nation of obese children? How does this affect our society?”
So we had to start preparing for next week’s challenge! Before actually doing any work we talked about our eating habits and watched the following video which is actually one of my favourite on the issue of junk food: http://www.graphicmotion.co.uk/video/video_a10_335_448.html We shared opinions regarding the facts presented and I asked them if they ever think of how nutritious the food they eat is before they actually eat it.Unfortunately, most of them said the video was an eye-opening experience for them since they suspected junk food is “bad” but never really thought how harmful it actually is to their health.
Then we looked at some worrying facts regarding the prevalence of obesity. There is great information and lots of interesting facts here: http://www.noo.org.uk/NOO_about_obesity/child_obesity
We saw that unfortunately Greeks have one of the highest obesity rates in Europe although we are supposed to hold the key to Mediterranean diet. (The reasons this phenomenon is going on will be the focus of one of our upcoming lessons)
Before they left I reminded them that one last thing all of them will have to do – apart from presenting their arguments- is to give a mini-talk, a project we started last week as a way for them to improve their speaking and writing skills. There are only 3 rules students have to follow: 1) their talk should be around 5 mins 2) they have to incorporate technology in their talk and 3) they can’t skip doing it! We visited www.debate.org and http://debategraph.org/Stream.aspx?nid=61932&vt=bubble&dc=focus in order to inspire and help them prepare their own points. Following the debate, one group of students will have to write a short article presenting their opinion on the matter whereas the second group will have to create a questionnaire on obesity. ( this is great as a model: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WQQTMM9)
Hopefully, everything will go according to plan and we’ll have a really interesting exchange of ideas!
