Board race
Divide students into 2 groups. Put the word “Vegetarianism” at the top of the board and make 2 columns: one that reads (A-M) and another (N-Z). Give the teams a time limit (e.g. 3 minutes) and ask them to come up with as many words related to the topic of vegetarianism as they can in their column. The letters show what the first letter of the words/expressions can be for the groups. When they have finished, the teams look at each other’s solutions and dispute answers on the grounds of spelling, legibility, word form etc.
Polarities
After generating a sufficient amount of vocabulary, draw a cline on the board (e.g. under the already existing table) or simply point at two ends of the classroom to indicate the two ends: being a vegetarian or a meat-eater. Ask students to stand along the cline, reflecting their opinion. Then, students with similar opinions brainstorm arguments to support their opinions.
Note: if everybody stands at the same end of the scale, ask them to think about what a person at the other end of the scale would say.
“Why I’m a weekday vegetarian” – video
Play the video once and ask students to pay attention to what the main idea of the video is. After that, to check deeper understanding, play the video for the second time and tell students that they should try to remember some new information from the video. Then, in open-class, do the “Think” section with your class.
Alternatively, you can also think of this activity as a regular listening task: give students the questions on paper before playing it again, let them read through the questions, and have them choose the right answers.
Key lexis
Before watching the video for the second time, you might want to check students’ understanding of and/or pre-teach the following vocabulary items: hippie / hypocritical / mere / emission / tuck into / tastebud / culprit / footprint
1-minute challenge
Ask students to come up with 10 other pieces of information they learnt from the video. These can refer to anything: the content, the presenter, etc.
Reactions
Put students into pairs and ask them to discuss if they would try being a weekday vegetarian. Conduct open-class feedback at the end of the activity and see if there are any people who would take the challenge and go weekday veggie. If they agree to do so, make sure you get back to this in another lesson and ask for feedback.
Extra
For more information, you can use the “Dig Deeper” section that contains multiple additional resources to explore.
The short video TEDtalk by Graham Hill is great, and also introduces the idea of ‘Weekday Veg,’ which is being vegetarian Mon thru Fri and its advantages. Really a great video (4 min.) on this topic Good eLesson Inspiration to broach the broader topic of our addiction to meat products to students (and colleagues). Graham also mentions how damaging the world meat industry is, to health, the environment, and its many fellow animal victims, billions of the slaughtered every year. Students can listen carefully to those points and discuss.
Tomorrow is World Teachers’ Day, Oct. 5, created by UNESCO: http://en.unesco.org/themes/teachers/world-teachers-day
Here a poster: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0025/002590/259021e.pdf Maybe it could be printed and posted where you teach
Here a message from Irina Bokova and others: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0025/002592/259268e.pdf
In part, it states:
‘As the world works together to realize the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals, we appeal to our partners in governments and across the education and private sectors to commit to building a highly skilled, valued and empowered education workforce. This constitutes a critical path to realizing SDG 4, which envisions a world in which every girl, boy, woman and man has access to quality education and lifelong learning opportunities. This means securing decent working conditions and fair wages for all teachers including at the tertiary level. It means providing teachers with training and development. It means increasing the number of quality teachers, especially in those countries with high numbers of untrained teaching personnel. It means removing unnecessary restrictions on research and teaching and defending academic freedom at all education levels. Finally, it means raising the status of teachers around the world in a way that honors and reflects the impact they have on the strength of society.’
We can all support what it envisions.