LessonsStaying Healthy
Do carrots help you see in the dark?
—Sarah Philpot and Lesley Curnick, Academic Skills 3, p. 19
When you go to another country, staying healthy is important. You may not like the food at school, and eat a lot of snacks instead. Or maybe you often have to stay up late doing your homework, and don't get enough sleep. Over time, that kind of lifestyle can make you sick. Okay, we can't do anything about the food, but we can suggest something to make homework a whole lot easier. How? By showing you how to improve your study skills.
Study skills are what you use when you read a book in school, or listen to the teacher. Some students have a problem with this. They may read (or listen) too slowly, and not be able keep up in class, or simply not understand what they have read (or heard). You can start to work on your study skills by doing some exercises about new ways that people are using to stay healthy in "Innovations in Health and Medicine."
Here is what students can expect to learn from this exercise.
- Sharpen your reading skills.
One way to better understand what you read is to try and predict what you think it will be about. It seems strange, but thinking about what you are about to read, even if you are wrong, can help make it easier to understand something. One way you can do this is to look for topic sentences, which often tell what a paragraph is about.
- Acquire new language for writing.
While reading can help you to understand other people's feelings and ideas, students will also need to be able to write about your own, as well. Rephrasing, or changing the words and sentence structure of, what others have written can help you to accomplish this.
- Develop a paragraph.
You will learn to identify the different parts of a paragraph. These include a topic sentence, which gives the subject of a paragraph; several body sentences, which develop the subject further; and a final sentence, which concludes or summarizes the paragraph.
- Write a paragraph.
You will have a chance to practice what they have learned by writing paragraphs on two health‐related topics.
- Record new vocabulary.
Recording new vocabulary in a notebook is an important way to remember it later. You will decide which words are important enough for you to write down, as well as what information to include with those words so you can remember them later.
Try This!
Do the exercises in "Innovations in Health and Medicine." For many of the exercises, you will need to work with a partner. Other activities, such as paragraph writing, should be done individually. After completing each exercise, compare your answers with your partner's. Then, check answers in the answer key. (You may need to install Acrobat Reader to view these materials.)