The Food Factor

 Last week was a busy one. I visited our intermediate students while they were away on their overnight trip to an outdoor education center, hosted our final Winter 2025 guest speaker for my York TL AQs, and began my Media Specialist AQ with AML as a course participant. I don't know if it's because I had a week to prepare, but I felt as if my lessons with my ESL students were more cohesive and impactful than they have been. It also may have something to do with including food into the mix.

I use a book I purchased called "Everyday Literacy: Listening and Speaking" with my early-stage ESL students. Each week, it provides a picture prompt with some simple vocabulary to use. This week's image was about playing instruments in a parade. Usually, I don't do a lot around holidays. Some religions object to marking these occasions, and it prompts me to consider which holidays are and are not mentioned in public schools. However, in this case, my regular programming dovetailed nicely with St. Patrick's Day, which was Monday, March 17. We talked about parades a bit and used the St. Patrick's Day Parade as an example.

After my success with cooking French toast and pancakes with the students, I decided to look at another avenue using food. We bought some Lucky Charms cereal and "read" the box to understand what all those shapes and marshmallows were meant to be. We wrote using our sentence starters ("I see ...") and then branched out to work on verbs ("We can ______ cereal"). I noticed that the students were more willing to write when food was involved.

For the ESL students communicating at a higher stage, we continued to investigate popcorn. The novice learners are working on verbs and nouns, but the more advanced speakers are focusing on adjectives and descriptive words with more advanced vocabulary. They tend to be reluctant writers who second guess and question every word. They enjoyed eating popcorn and so we continued our investigations. We wrote procedures on how to make microwave popcorn. To add an extra layer of challenge, students were able to earn a piece of popcorn for every word they wrote. This was highly motivating, and I had students write much more than they usually do, because they wanted the food.

We also compared different flavours of popcorn, to add to our word banks. We sampled Chicago mix and white cheddar popcorn.

I've started my Media AQ and I need to seriously consider how to incorporate more media literacy education in my lessons for my multilingual learners. I really miss having a separate strand of media literacy as a reportable subject. With the new curriculum, media literacy is one of the "umbrella expectations" in Strand A, where it is meant to be integrated into all language instruction, but that does not seem to be the case most of the time. (Dear Ontario Ministry of Education: please release the examples for the Language Curriculum! What are you waiting for?) It can be challenging to try to understand how to express ideas around purpose and messages when you are still gathering basic nouns and verbs and simple means of expression, but it can be done.  Maybe I can talk about when it's typical to eat popcorn (media environments) or how cereal is not a universal breakfast food for many cultures but was promoted by companies as a "balanced breakfast" (economic implications). I'll figure it out - eventually.