Symptom Videos
Leave a commentThis week’s focus in my level 2 class is talking about illnesses and their symptoms. Most of these words are cognates, so I gave them a real patient form to see what they could figure out.
First I asked them to highlight what they could figure out. Then we noted which ones I wanted them to know well. The nice thing about this list is that they are not limiting themselves to only those when they are practicing.
Next they were assigned an illness to research and list the common symptoms. This could be homework. Nice cross-curricular connection, huh?! We used measles, food poisoning, sun poisoning, black eye, migraine, flu, stomach virus, pregnant, diabetic, common cold, ear infection, poison ivy, peanut allergy, strep throat, syphilis, pink eye and kidney stone.
Then we watched some YouTube clips from Seinfeld, season 9. Kramer acting at Hospital Kramer and his buddy are acting out their symptoms so medical students can practice diagnosing. The quality isn’t great, but it got the point across to the students that hospitals do this. It created a nice real-life scenario. There are 6 parts to this on YouTube.
Finally using their assigned illness/disease, they created a Kramer video with a little story and their symptoms. Props were highly encouraged!
Next class, I will show some of the videos to see if they can figure out the illness/disease in Spanish. Instant interpretive listening activity!


