Monthly Archives: June 2018

The Weekly Text, June 8, 2018: A Lesson Plan on Using Adverbs to Modify Adjectives

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using adverbs to modify adjectives.

I begin this lesson with this short Cultural Literacy exercise on the idiomatic expression If the shoe fits, wear it. I like to keep a second do-now ready in the event that this lesson, for whatever reason, runs into a second day, so here is a second Cultural Literacy on the concept of avatar. This structured, scaffolded worksheet on adverbs modifying adjectives is the mainstay of this lesson, and you will probably want the teacher’s copy of it as well. Finally, here is a learning support in the form of a word bank that will help your students identify the best words to use in the cloze exercises in the first section of the worksheet.

That’s it. See you next week, if not before.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

The Devil’s Dictionary: Encomium

Encomium, n. A kind of intellectual fog, through which the virtues of its object are seen magnified by many diameters.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Diminutive (adj)

Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective diminutive, which is a word high schoolers ought to know.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Dr. Daniel T. Willingham on Using Context for Building Reading Skills and Vocabulary

“Looking words up in a dictionary will be of limited use—not useless, but, but we must acknowledge that it will be just one context in which to understand the word’s meaning, and it’s possible that the student will misunderstand the definition. Explicit instruction of new words is more likely to be successful the way teachers usually implement it, with multiple examples and with the requirement that students use each word in different contexts. There is a good evidence that students do learn vocabulary this way.

In addition to consistent vocabulary instruction, teachers can make it more likely that students will learn words they encounter in context. They can give students pointers that will help them use context for figure out an unfamiliar word. For example, students can learn to use the clues in the sentence about the unknown word’s part of speech, to use the setting described in the text to constrain the word’s meaning, and to use the tone of the text to help constrain meaning.”

Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.

Ruse (n)

It’s a clean-up day at Mark’s Text Terminal. While sorting through some neglected folders, I found this context clues worksheet on the noun ruse. This would be a good word to teach students while teaching them about, say, the Trojan Horse.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Spoon River Anthology

(1915) A volume of verse epitaphs by Edgar Lee Masters. The men and women of Spoon River narrate their own biographies from the cemetery where they like buried. Realistic and sometimes cynical, the free-verse monologues often contradict the pious and optimistic epitaphs written on the gravestones. The poems made their first appearance in Reedy’s Mirror in 1914 and 1915, and William Marion Reedy himself was partly responsible for their inception: he gave Masters a copy of J.W. Mackall’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology. And the style of the Greek poems impressed Masters deeply. New Spoon River (1924) was a less successful sequel.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

A Worksheet on Identifying Active Verbs

Over the past couple of days, and after a couple of decades, I reread William Zinsser’s fine book Writing to Learn; it was every bit as good as I remembered it. William Zinsser was a superlative prose stylist himself. Reading him on writing, quite simply, is a glimpse inside the workshop of a master.

And I found a passage in it, which Mr. Zinsser excerpted from something Norman Mailer wrote about the infamous Benny Paret vs. Emile Griffith III fight in 1962. Because I have a student this year involved and interested in boxing, I grabbed the passage and worked up, just now, this short exercise on identifying active verbs in a passage of text. Nota bene that there are two pages in this document; the second is the teacher’s copy/answer key with the active verbs in bold. I’m still trying to figure out lesson plans for these one-off differentiated worksheets. If you can use it, here is a lesson plan template to accompany the worksheet, which you can complete as you see fit (obviously).

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Bella Abzug on Tenured Professors

“We don’t want so much to see a female Einstein become an assistant professor. We want a woman schlemiel to get promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.”

Bella Abzug

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Augment (v)

It’s the morning of June 6. On this day 74 years ago, Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy, France in the D-day invasion. Also on this day, the first drive-in movie theater in the United States opened.

Today Mark’s Text Terminal offers this context clues worksheet on the verb augment. It seems to me it’s a word high-schoolers ought to know.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

The Algonquin Wits: Franklin Pierce Adams on the Fascist Ego

Il Duce, believing as he does in press censorship, probably will cut the last three words from the headline ‘Mussolini Best Man in Marconi’s Wedding.’”

Franklin Pierce Adams

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985