Monthly Archives: August 2026

Term of Art: Reliability

“reliability: A statistical term that refers to the consistency of test scores in different contexts or with different populations. A judgment of a high degree of reliability indicates that a test is dependable and relatively free from random errors of measurement.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Cultural Literacy: Jurisprudence

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of jurisprudence. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three relatively comprehensible sentences and two comprehension questions. I must admit, until I reviewed this document prior to publication on this blog, I didn’t have quite the grasp of this concept that I thought I did.

Any student looking down the road at law school might benefit from a look at this material.

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.

Word Origins: Barbecue

“barbecue: [M17th] This word comes from Spanish barbacoa, perhaps from Arawak (West Indies) barbacoa which was a ‘wooden frame on posts.’ Barbecue is used in space in the phrases barbecue mode and barbecue maneuver describing the rotation of a spacecraft to allow the heat of the sun to fall on all sides.”

Excerpted from: Creswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

The Weekly Text, 7 August 2026: Introduction to Writing Sentences Lesson 9, Writing the Exclamatory Sentence

This week’s Text is the ninth lesson plan (in a 17-lesson cycle) of the Introduction to Writing Sentences unit. This one, as the header above heralds, is on writing the exclamatory sentence. This worksheet on parsing sentences to find verbs opens the lesson. This scaffolded worksheet on writing exclamatory sentences is the principal work of this lesson.

And if you and your students need it, here learning support on writing exclamations that goes some distance in explaining what one does in prose when one exclaims–and why one almost always needs an exclamation point at the terminus of one of these sentences.

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.