Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun treaty. Belaboring the necessity of this word for social studies instruction would be an insult to you, esteemed reader, so enough said.
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.
“We should want to move beyond mere grades and test scores and make it our mission that when students leave our teachers and our schools, they not only earn strong grades and test scores, but they also embody a love for reading and literacy–that they leave us and ascend to more remote regions of the world while also discovering the power of their own minds. This is the genius that they for others to cultivate–to prepare, to raise, to grow, and help develop. Cultivating genius speaks to the responsibility and work that educators have.”
Excerpted from: Muhammad, Dr. Gholdy. Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. New York: Scholastic, 2020.
Here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots gress, grad, gradi, and grade. They mean to step and to go. Unsurprisingly, they are at the base of such high-frequency words in English as egress, digress, graduate, and regress, and the many parts of speech in which these words end up –e.g. regressive, graduation, regressive and aggressive.
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.
“Morality consists in suspecting other people of not being legally married.”
George Bernard Shaw
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on courtly love. This is a half-page worksheet with a three-sentence reading (the latter two of them longish compounds), and three comprehension questions. I guess this isn’t exactly a burning issue in social studies ritht now, but as I recall we were expected to address it in the freshman global studies cycle here in New York City–which is probably why I wrote it.
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.
“Curtain Wall: This non-load-bearing wall was first made possible with the introduction of the structural steel skeleton in the Carson Pirie Scott store (Chicago, 1899-1904). Years later, Walter Gropius acknowledged that in ‘modern architecture the wall is no more than a wall or climate barrier, which may consist of glass if maximum daylight is desirable.’ As a result, in 1925-1926, he created the workshop wing for the Dessau Bauhaus which became the precursor to the characteristic glass box building of the International Style. See bearing wall.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Here is a reading on the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980 along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I remember these years vividly–I saw the first headlines about the crisis as I was passing a newsstand in the Miami airport en route to Jamaica. It was a fraught time. I have a minor quibble with this reading in that it minimizes the brutality of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who was a genuinely nasty piece of work. And even though it is perhaps beyond the ken of this reading, it would have required little more than a sentence to mention that the Shah came to power subsequent to the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran, which deposed the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
The 1953 coup was engineered by both the United States Central Intelligence and the British MI6. In other words, as Dee Dee Ramone once put it, “Commando, involved again.”
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.
“Antithesis (noun): The juxtaposing of contrasting words or ideas through parallel of balanced phrasing; rhetorical counterposing of opposites, as by asserting something and denying its contrary; the second or opposite element in an expressed contrast. Pl. antitheses; adj. antithetic, antithetical; adv. antithetically.
‘The poet ate his salad with his fingers, leaf by leaf, while talking to me about the antithesis of nature and art.’ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
This week’s Text is the penultimate lesson in the 13-lesson unit on pronouns I engineered several years ago, and have been working on ever since. It is basically a pre-assessment review lesson to prepare student for the final lesson, a guided mastery exercise in which they review and recapitulate all the foregoing lessons.
I open this lesson with this Everyday Edit worksheet on “Women Get the Vote.” If the lesson enters a second day for whatever reason, here is another Everyday Edit, this one on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Here is the scaffolded worksheet for this lesson that is its primary work. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of same. I’ll put up the final lesson soon, and then there will be a 13-lesson unit on pronouns available in its entirety on Mark’s Text Terminal.
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.
“Couplet: In prosody, a pair of lines forming a unit, usually either because they set off as a separate stanze or because they rhyme. The best-known couplet is the soc-called heroic couplet.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged poetry, professional development
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