What I Eat in a Day
Updated: Aug 29
This ESL Lesson Plan What I Eat in a Day helps B1 learners talk about daily meals, healthy habits, and food preferences. The lesson introduces useful food-related vocabulary, cooking verbs, and phrases connected to healthy lifestyles.
📄B1 ⏱️60 min 📁17 slides
Outcomes and skills:
Expanded vocabulary related to food, meals, and cooking.
Practice in reasoning and critical thinking through “valid or not valid” food statements.
Vocabulary
roast
bite
freeze
boil
bake
stir
burn
steam
grill
comfort meal
on an empty stomach
balanced diet
homemade
skip a meal
grab a bite
guilty pleasure
Lesson plan
Lead-in
Students look at four food photos and discuss four questions — naming dishes, ingredients, meal choices, and what makes food healthy or unhealthy.
Vocabulary
Learners look at nine pictures and match cooking verbs — bake, boil, stir, grill, burn, freeze, steam, roast, bite — to the food each is commonly used with.
Phrases
Students read seven food-related phrases (comfort meal, on an empty stomach, balanced diet, etc.) and tick the ones they already know before checking meanings. Learners review definitions of all seven phrases, then use two of them to make questions and ask each other.
Reading
Students read a short text about the narrator's breakfast and lunch, paying attention to the target words in bold.
Practice
Learners continue the story with words removed, choosing from a word bank — freeze, baking, oven, burn, meal, roast — to fill the blanks.
Food Diary
Students photograph their own breakfast, lunch, and dinner, then prepare a short presentation to describe their food in the next lesson.
Eating Healthy
Open discussion: if students could change one eating habit in their daily life, what would it be?
Processed Food
Learners read key facts about processed food, with examples like chips, instant noodles, and sausages.
Fermented Food
Learners read key facts about fermented food, with examples like yogurt, kimchi, and pickles.
Think
Students sort eight food items (yogurt, canned beans, miso, cereal, etc.) into processed food or fermented food.
Valid not Valid?
Using a premises–reasoning–exception–conclusion framework, students evaluate a worked example about chocolate before judging six further statements about food and health for logical validity.
Discussion
Students discuss four questions comparing home cooking to eating out, their own processed vs. fermented food habits, and their favorite healthy and unhealthy foods.
Image credit: photos by Kateryna Hliznitsova, Karolina Grabowska and Monika Grabkowska, Unsplash, used with permission.
