To finish the day, here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots loqu and locu. They mean to speak and are very productive in English, particularly with words like loquacious and locution used in educated discourse.
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.
“Sacra (Santa) Conversazione: A type of representation of the Madonna and Child with saints, developed by 15th-century Italian painters (Domenico Veneziano, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Fra Angelico), in which the persons represented occupy a unified space instead of separate panels and are made to appear related to each other by gesture and attitude.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
This may not–but it may be–the best time to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on survivor’s guilt. Since I had it already prepared, there it is.
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.
“absolutism (deriv. Lat. legibus absolutus, absolved from the laws.) System of unlimited government in which the governed possess no representation, right to vote or part in the administration and in which there are no legal or constitutional restraints on the ruler.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, term of art
Here is a context clues worksheet on the verb disparage, which is only used transitively. Don’t forget your direct object! You must disparage someone or something. If you need help deciding, drop a comment–I’m happy to help!
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.
“What about adults? Would the process of reading Billy Bathgate have been different if I had read it on paper rather than my Kindle? Experiments investigating this question have mostly examined the types of texts students would encounter in school—an expository text describing the function of the heart, for example—but have in some cases included narratives as well. Most studies have shown that reading from paper holds a small edge over reading from a screen either in reading comprehension or reading speed. People often report that reading from a screen feels more effortful, although at least one study shows not difference when more objective measures of effort were used.
Why would reading on a screen be different? Small changes in design can prompt small changes in comprehension. For example, comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages, compared to scrolling. And clickable links (hyperlinks) incur a cost to comprehension, even if you don’t click them. Because you can see that they are clickable, you still need to make a decision about whether or not to click. That draws on your attention, and so carries a cost to comprehension. Although it has not been fully investigated yet, researchers suspect that the three-dimensionality of paper books may be important—it’s easier to remember an event as occurring at the end of a book with the spatial cue that it happened on a page near the back of the book. These small effects often add up to slight knock to comprehension when reading from a screen.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
Here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “In All That Rain.”
I use this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the noun phrase and idiom “Rank and File” to open this lesson. Here is a scan of the illustration and questions that is the work of this lesson, as well as a typescript of the answer key.
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.
“polysemy: The property of a single word which has two or more distinct but related senses. Thus the noun screen is polysemous, since it is used variously of a fire screen, a cinema screen, a television screen, and so on.
Compare homonymy. The difference, in principle, is that in cases of homonymy the senses are quite unconnected; therefore they are not treated as belonging to the same word. But in many cases, it is hard to decide, and in theories of meaning the distinction is not always seen as valid.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Here are a reading on Richard III and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that has a number of uses in both social studies and English language arts classes, I would think.
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.
“Sun * Moon * Venus * Mercury * Mars * Jupiter * Saturn
Our sky-watching, hunter-gathering ancestors had 7 marked out as a number of enormous importance for tens of thousands of years. For this is the number of the visible planets—‘the five wanderers,’ plus the sun and the moon.
This respect for the 7 became ever more ingrained as the first agricultural civilizations allowed for accurate fixed observations from the calendar-keeping priests, whose temples throughout the ancient Middle East were all equipped with star-watching terraces above their cult chambers. It is an intriguing element within the cult of the 7 that the planets are not all visible at once: Mercury and most especially Venus (whose horns are occasionally visible) are the morning and evening stars. Bright Jupiter, luminous Saturn, and the more elusive red Mars belong to the full night. So we have always known that we have been watched, influenced, and enclosed by these 7 who right from the dawn of our consciousness have intriguingly different characteristics and hours of dominance and passageways through the heavens.
Although most of mankind probably now accepts that the earth is a planet which circles around the sun, and the moon is a planet of the earth, the mystery of our 7 encircling heavens still haunts our imagination. But this once immutable number of 7 keeps changing. First we knocked the seven down to five (as the sun and moon were taken off the list), then, in relatively modern times, it grew to nine. Uranus was discovered in 1781, followed by Neptune in 1846, then Pluto in 1930 (though this was later demoted to a dwarf planet to bring us back down to eight planets). So, currently, we have eight planets and five dwarf planets (Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris), as well as five named moons orbiting around Pluto.”
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 Independent Practice, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, numeracy, readings/research, science literacy
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.