Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Lessons For Living Well is a great new online lesson on health and nutrition designed for English Language Learners. It’s very accessible.

The site was developed by the San Diego Community College District, Continuing Education Adult ESL Program, in partnership with Sacramento County Office of Education.

They also have a nice classroom curriculum teachers can use.

Anatomy Arcade has a bunch of cool games and interactives teaching about….human anatomy.

Many are probably not accessible to English Language Learners. However, its Whack-A-Bone Game certainly is, and provides audio support to the text.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Health.

Try Drugs is a fascinating site developed by the city of Oslo, Norway in an effort to discourage teen drug use (this is the English version).

It simulates the effect different drugs have on you.

English Language Learners might not understand all of the words they see, but they’ll certainly get the idea.

I’ve placed the link on my website under Health.

I’ve posted in the past about Food Fury, a good online game designed to teach nutrition. Thanks to the excellent blog, Future-Making Serious Games, I recently learned the people behind Food Fury (Playnormous) have unveiled some new health-related games.

The new ones include Juice Jumble and Bubble Trouble.

I’ll be placing links to the games on my website under Health.

The Alt Search Engines blog just posted about a different kind of “search” than they usually do. This one is called Tox Mystery, is from the National Library of Medicine, and has the user search for hazardous chemicals within a house.

It’s animated, with audio support for all the text, and is an interactive game. It’s very accessible to English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link under Health on my website.

Sara’s Quest is a very visual online game in simple English about drugs and drug abuse.  Most of it should be accessible to Intermediate English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my English For Beginners page under Health.

Virtual Body offers a narrated tour of the brain and heart.  Text is provided with the audio.

The vocabulary used is probably most appropriate for Intermediate English Language Learners, but I’ve placed the link on my English Themes for Beginners under Body.  That just seemed like the best fit.

The Packard Children’s Hospital has a wonderful site for kids which I’ve entitled Hospital Connection.

It’s animated with text and audio support (be sure to click on the closed-captioning “on”), and helps children understand how to get ready to go to the hospital and what happens once they’re there.

There are lots of games and opportunities for vocabulary development.  It’s very accessible to English Language Learners at all levels.

I’ve placed the link on my English For Beginners page under Health.

Kids Health has two games that would be accessible to English Language Learners.

One is Spelling Bee, where the player has to correctly spell health-related words. It provides some audio support, and shares the word’s definition and a sentence example.

Another is Time For Bed, where players are shown different animals and types of humans (adult, kid) to determine which needs more sleep.

I’ve placed both on my English For Beginners page under Health.

Staying Healthy: An English Learners Guide to Health Care and Healthy Living is an excellent, and freely downloadable and reproducible, health literacy curriculum from the Florida Literacy Coalition.

It’s so good I’m adding it to my list of The Best Health Sites For English Language Learners.

Healthy Roads Media has great health information available online — in multiple languages.

I’ve had a link to their online videos on my English for Beginners page under Health for quite awhile. They’re well-designed, and closed-captioned. Their English versions are great for English Language Learners.

They’ve recently added quite a few new resources, so it’s worth visiting if you haven’t done so already.

Stadium Nutrition from Aetna is an interactive exercise where you create a meal you’d eat at a baseball stadium and you’re then told its nutritional content.

Beginner English Language Learners can use it for vocabulary development, and higher-level students can use it for a lesson on healthy eating.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Beginners page under Food.

This is another interactive from the Centers For Disease Control.  It’s called Ad-Decoder, and shows students how ads try to manipulate us.

It’s probably accessible to Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners.

I’ve placed the link on my Intermediate English page at the bottom of the Reading category.

Up until now, I have only written posts about new additions to my website.   In addition to continuing to do that, I’m now going to periodically highlight exceptional links that have been there for awhile but might be overlooked.  And it’s easy to miss sites when there are over 7,000 of them!

Today, I’d like to point out Medline Plus from the National Institutes of Health.  It has hundreds of interactive audio/visual/text presentations on various illnesses that are generally presented in English accessible to Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners.

I have both the main link, and direct links to common ailments, on my English For Beginners page near the top of the Health section.

Since it was so helpful to my students, other educators, and me to develop my  Websites Of The Year lists, I’ve decided to try and develop a new list on a different topic each month.

This month I’ll be sharing a ranked list of what I think are the twelve best sites that combine health information/literacy with English Language development.

All of these sites, and hundreds of others, can also be found on my English For Beginners page under Health.

On this list, I’m only listing sites that would be easy for students to access on their own.  For some excellent lesson plans and classroom teaching resources on health, you can go to my Teacher’s Page under Health Lessons.   Of those, I particular like, and have used, Picture Stories For Adult ESL Health Literacy by Kate Singleton. (I’ve also added Staying Healthy: An English Learners Guide to Health Care and Healthy Living,  an excellent health literacy curriculum from the Florida Literacy Coalition, to this list).

Here are The Best Health Sites For English Language Learners:

Number twelve is English Med. The site is designed to help medical professionals learn workplace English.  However, I think the audio and animated cartoons are great for any English Language Learner.

Visit The Dentist With Marty is number eleven.  It’s an interactive and animated story with text and audio support sponsored by the American Dental Association.  It gives a good idea of the importance of tooth care and what happens when you go to the dentist.

Number ten is Mouth Power.  It’s an interactive and engaging game about dental health.  Animations and text with audio support is provided.

I’m ranking the LaRue Medical Literacy Exercises as number nine. It provides excellent information on diabetes, nutrition, and high blood pressure in an interactive way in multiple languages.

Number eight is Kids Health Galaxy from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.  It gives an engaging and accessible overview of what a hospital patient might experience.

I’ve put Project Care in the seventh place.  It provides audio and video, along with vocabulary practice,  on several health issues.  The site is accessible to Intermediate and Advanced English Language Learners.

Number six is from the National Institutes of Health and called NIDCR Student Activities.  It’s a series of closed-captioned cartoons on oral health.

Number five is the excellent Health Story List from the California Distance Learning Project.  I particularly like this site because it has a number of stories related to public health issues.

I’ve ranked The Language Guide as number four.  I think it’s the best basic English dictionary around, and its sections on The Body, The Body 2, and Medicine provide English Language Learners with necessary vocabulary. 

I’ve put BrainPop Health Movies at number three.  BrainPop has made several of my lists, and it’s also the only one that isn’t free (though you can see sample movies at no cost).  You can access great animated movies in accessible English (closed-captioned, too) for a class-rate of a few hundred dollars.  I’ve found that it is well worth the cost.

Number two is Healthy Roads Media.  It has excellent and accessible videos on many diseases and in many languages.

And now, the number one ranked health website for English Language Learners is…Medline Plus’ Interactive Health Tutorials from the National Institutes of Health.   These excellent slideshows provide images, text, and audio support in accessible English explaining scores of diseases, treatments, and prevention measures.  Plus, they’re all available in Spanish, too.

This list, as with all the others I’ve made, is definitely a subjective one.  I’m certainly open to, and eager for, feedback and suggestions.   My main disappointment is that, apart from the California Distance Learning Project site, I really couldn’t find many accessible online materials on public health issues.

I hope people will find this list helpful.

The Centers For Disease Control have an online Comic Creator to help young people learn about coping with stress.

It’s a nice interactive site.  First, you “drop-and-drag” various parts of a simple dialogue between two student characters dealing with with a stressful situation.

Next, you get to create your own comic strip.  You can print it out, but unfortunately you can’t post it online.

The activity is accessible to early intermediate English Language Learners.  I’ve placed it on my English For Beginners/Early Intermediate page at the bottom of the Non-Fiction section.

Cold Aid is an interactive application designed to help parents figure out if their child has a cold or a more serious illness.

It has audio that is closed-captioned (be sure to click it on).  It asks you a number of questions about the child’s symptoms, and then reaches a conclusion and offers a recommendation.

It’s accessible to Early Intermediate English Language Learners, and would teach content knowledge about health as well as provide a language development activity.

I’ve placed the link on my English For Beginners page at the bottom of the extensive Health section.

Today I learned through some ESL listservs about a site called Everyday Life.  It’s sponsored by a North Carolina-based organization called GCF Learn Free.

There are seventeen excellent interactive lessons with images, text, and audio that help English Language Learners with…everyday life.

These lessons include ones about ATMs, jobs applications,  reading a bus map, etc.

You have to register for it, but it only takes seconds.  If you have trouble getting the cursor to write in the boxes, just use the tab key to move down.  That seemed to do the trick.

I’ve placed the link on my English Themes For Beginners under both Favorite Sites and Life Skills.

I’ve posted previously about many of the links I have for student activities related to health (Learning About Health and Brush Those Teeth!).

I also have some very helpful links to teachers if they want to plan health-related lessons.   You can find these on my Teacher’s Page under Health Lessons — ESL.

One link you’ll find there is to a series of Picture Stories around various health issues.  They’ve been developed by Kate Singleton in Virginia.  I’ve used them in my classes, and they’ve worked very well.

Another link is the Health and Literacy Special Collection from World Education.   This offers a series of excellent health education resources appropriate for English Language Learners.