Hot off the press (it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day yesterday), here is a context clues worksheet on abandon. This isn’t the verb, but rather the abstract noun signifying, as Merriam-Webster’s has it, “a thorough yielding to natural impulses; esp: ENTHUSIASM, EXUBERANCE.”
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.
“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
John Kenneth Galbraith
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
If your students announce an interest in classic American cinema, as several of mine have in the past couple of days, then this reading on the The Godfather and its accompanying reading comprehension worksheet might be just the ticket for them. I’m developing a new series of readings, so there will me more to come on the cinema.
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.
“Transaction for Action, or Incident. ‘The policeman struck the man with his club, but the transaction was not reported.’ ‘The picking of a pocket is a criminal transaction.’ In a transaction two or more persons must have an active or assenting part; a business transaction, Transactions of the Geographical Society, etc. The Society’s action would be better called Proceedings.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
If you teach world history, or whatever your district, municipality, or state calls it, this independent practice worksheet on absolutism might have some utility in your classroom.
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.
“A film (1963) based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George about the threat of global nuclear destruction. The film was directed by Stanley Kubrick and starred Peter Sellers in three roles, including that of Dr. Strangelove himself (a crippled ex-Nazi scientist) and that of the US president who finds himself helpless to stop events spiralling out of control.
‘Gentleman, you can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!’
Such was the success of the film that in subsequent years any hawkish Cold War warrior was liable to be labelled as a ‘Dr. Strangelove.'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here, on a busy, wet Monday morning, is a context clues worksheet the word rote, which is used both as a noun and an adjective. This is a word I teach students so that on those rare occasions when I need them to learn by rote, they understand what I’m talking about.
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.
“…if this writing up of a new faith is intended for a message, then it is only a paltry one, with its feathers, its bowls of human blood and its rhetoric.”
The Spectator
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
Here is a relatively high-interest reading on quarterback Joe Montana and a reading comprehension worksheet to accompany it.
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.
“Sixty is the base number of the Sumerian number system, fully evolved in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) by 3000 BC, and it remains the essence of how we measure time: sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour. The number is also the base of of the 360 degrees of a circle, as in the fully imagined sky of the Sumerians (of which only a portion was visible from temple roofs), divided into six houses of 60 degrees. In Sumerian culture, the number 1 was expressed by a simple wedge, cut into clay or wood, and 60 by a great wedge.
Sixty has the versatility of being neatly divisible by 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2, and therefore makes for easy subdivision of irrigated land and the harvested crops which were initially gathered in sixty-fold sheaves, just as in pre-decimal English currency sixty pennies (60d) were a crown (five shillings/5s).”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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