Monthly Archives: October 2023

Cultural Literacy: Stanza

OK, moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a stanza in poetry and poetics. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and two comprehension questions. A clear, simple, and symmetrical introduction to this important concept in studying poetry.

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.

Coherence

“Coherence (noun): Order and sense in expression, or ease and interrelationship in arrangement of thoughts or parts of a sentence; logical consistency or clarity of syntax. Adjective: coherent; Adverb: coherently; Verb: cohere.

“Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity.’ James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son.”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

The Weekly Text, 3 November 2023: Styling Sentences Lesson 15, Sentences with a Series of Lively Pairs

Today is the first Friday of Native American Heritage Month 2023 in the United States (Canada observes this month in June as National Indigenous History Month). I have materials to post, including a couple of Cultural Literacy worksheets today.

However, in order to keep them in a relatively tight series, this morning I post the fifteenth and final lesson plan of the Styling Sentences Unit, this one on sentences with a series of lively pairs. Nouns are one of the workhorses of the English language (along with verbs), and this lesson illustrates for students how solid, concrete nouns that appeal to the senses make prose come alive.

This lesson opens with this on parsing sentences to find conjunctions. This scaffolded and supported worksheet is the primary work of the lesson. Finally, here is a learning support in the form of a word bank to help students master this sentence form using pairs of lively nouns or noun phrases.

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.

Admiral Rickover on God and Bureaucracy

“If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you, but the bureaucracy won’t.”

Hyman Rickover

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

Common English Verbs Followed by an Infinitive: Mean

Finally this morning, here is a worksheet on the verb mean as it is used with an infinitive. I mean to visit Coney Island this weekend.

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.

Fisher King

“Fisher King: One of the chief characters in medieval legends dealing with the quest for the Holy Grail. The Fisher King was the keeper of the Grail relics, including the spear of Longinus used to wound Jesus as he hung on the cross. The Fisher King suffered from a wound made by the same spear. The wound destroyed the Fisher King’s virility and, by a sympathetic transference, turned his realm into a wasteland. A new and purer guardian of the relics, in the form of the Grail hero, must intervene (see GALAHAD). The task of the hero is not simply to find the relics themselves, which had been stolen, but also to free the king so he may die a peaceful death and bring life and fertility back to the king’s realm. See WASTE LAND, THE.”

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

Cultural Literacy: Loch Ness Monster

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Loch Ness Monster, a subject of no small fascination for me when I was a child in school (which is why I have tagged it as high-interest material, which I suspect it will still be for a certain type of elementary school student). This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading, both longish compounds, so you may want to take a look at them if you have emergent readers or English language learners on your hands, and three comprehension questions.

Somewhere along the line, I gathered the impression that Nessie, as the monster is affectionately known, was definitively disproved as a hoax. The reading in this document does not mention it, nor, particularly, does the Wikipedia page for the Loch Ness Monster. (The page, at its bottom, however, does warn that the article “…may lend undue weight to fringe sources and hypotheses.” For my part, I remain–mostly–agnostic.)

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.

Term of Art: Systematic Phonics

“systematic phonics: Direct reading instruction that explicitly teaches the relationships between letters and sounds in a sequence of interconnected lessons.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

The Weekly Text, 27 October 2023: Styling Sentences Lesson 14, Using the Serial Comma

Believe it or not, after all these weeks, we’re down to the penultimate lesson in the Styling Sentences Unit: ergo, this week’s Text is the fourteenth lesson plan in the series, this one on what strikes me as an important area of English usage and punctuation, using the serial comma.

This lesson opens with this worksheet on parsing sentences to find adjectives. Here is the scaffolded and supported worksheet that is the centerpiece of the lesson. Finally, here is a learning support on using the serial comma.

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.

Millefiori

“Millefiori: (It., a thousand flowers) Glassmaking technique in which rods of colored glass are fused, after which the bundled mass is cut transversely. The flower-like sections are used for beads and also embedded in clear glass for decorative effects.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.