Tobacco and Literacy Education Project: Reading and Writing About Secondhand Smoke

Details

Activity Description

This site offers three lessons: a math lesson on calculating the cost of smoking; a language arts lesson which is a reading and writing activity on the topic of secondhand smoke; and using research skills to find out more about tobacco and smoking. In this lesson students will learn about secondhand smoke through reading and writing activities. The lesson provides language arts practice including reading comprehension, vocabulary development, and writing skills practice, as well as some basic math using percents. While furthering the core language arts goals of the adult education classroom, this lesson meets a key tobacco education need: showing learners that secondhand smoke harms the health of nonsmokers, especially young children.

Preparation

1. All the information and materials you need to conduct three language arts activities are found at the link above labeled Example Web Site.
2. Download and print the language arts lesson including the student materials and the take home assignment if you want to use it. The reading materials are at two levels, so decide which students need which level and make the appropriate number of copies of each.
3. You will want to visit the two Web sites contained within the lesson that are used as reference sites with background materials to introduce the topic and activities. Since it appears that the materials at the Surgeon General's site seem to have moved, here are more current links to those materials:
   • The Health Consequences of Involuntary Exporsure to Tobacco Smoke: A Report of the Surgent General
   • Much of the information from the Fact Sheets, now appears to be located at the Center for Disease Control , so use this link instead.
4. You may also decide to send students to the CDC links for further study at home or in a computer lab. If so, figure out what method you want to use to get them to the Web sites. See the Teacher's Tips below for ideas if you need them.

How-To

1. Rather than duplicate the lesson content here, just refer to the lesson at the Example Web Site (above).
2. In addition to the lesson, you may want to use some sort of flashcard tool to help with the new vocabulary words. Several of those are available online. You may want to try Flashcard Machine or Quizlet .

Teacher Tips

• The Teacher Notes and Answer Key are found at the end of the lesson document. The "tips" found in the side bars of the teacher's notes provide some good ideas for lesson presentation and student grouping.
• In order get students to the Web sites, you can make them Favorites or Bookmark the sites on each computer browser, e-mail them the links, e-mail a word processing document with the links in it, or post the links on your class Web page.

More Ways

• Be sure to check the other two lessons at this site for math and research skills lessons.

Program Areas

• ABE: Adult Basic Education

Levels

• High

Subjects

• Math
  • Percentages
• Reading
  • Consumer Skills
  • Critical Thinking/Decision Making
  • Health
  • Vocabulary
• Reasoning Through Language Arts
  • Essays
• Writing
  • Paragraph Skills

Tags