“Empaquetage: A special form of New Realism associated chiefly with Bulgarian artist Christo, which consists of packaging objects with common wrapping materials, especially plastic sheeting. The best known empaquetages (wrappings) have been done on buildings, although smaller objects (such as live women) and larger forms (such as cliffs) have been packaged.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the fall of Rome. This is half-page worksheet that offers the barest of introductions to the topic. Still, it is a good general introduction or a memory-jogger if your students need one.
It might make more interesting–even compelling–reading if one adds the context of, say, news footage of events at the United States capitol on January 6, 2021.
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.
“Teetotaler, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Here are a pair of context clues worksheets on sober and sobriety, respectively an adjective and a noun.
In writing these, I sought to include both primary meanings of sober, i.e., where alcohol and intoxicants are concerned, “sparing in the use of food or drink,” “not addicted to intoxicating drink,” and “not drunk”; where an approach to life and its vagaries are concerned, “marked by sedate or gravely or earnestly thoughtful character or demeanor,” “marked by temperance, moderation, or seriousness,” and “showing no excessive or extreme qualities of fancy, emotion, or prejudice”
The noun sobriety simply means “the quality or state of being sober.” In the worksheet for this word, then, I also attempted to create prose that students could use to infer the above meanings of sober. As I prepared these for publication, I tried to remember why I wrote them, but couldn’t. So I don’t know if I intended to use them together in one sitting, or to use them discretely over a week’s time, and use sobriety to gauge understanding and retention of the previously used worksheet for sober.
In any case, they’re yours now if you want them, so you can use them as you will.
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.
Here is a learning support on five kinds of sentences. I grabbed this from Sylvan Barnet and Marcia Stubbs’ Barnet and Stubbs Practical Guide to Writing with Readings, Seventh Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). I used an earlier edition of this book for the very first college course I took in the spring of 1990. When I mentioned my admiration for the utility and ease of use of the book, a friend of mine thoughtfully made me a gift of the edition cited above.
Anyway, this learning support doesn’t deal with the four kinds of sentences, i.e. declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory, for which I am currently preparing learning supports which will appear here in the near future. This document deals with syntactical structures, to wit, the simple, compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences, as well as the sentence fragment. It’s one page, so it’s simple but (I hope) helpful because of that simplicity.
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 does the title of Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1350-52) mean? It means “ten days” and refers to the number of days the narrators spend telling stories. One hundred stories are told by seven women and three men during the Black Death of 1348.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Here is a reading on the influenza vaccination along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
Over the years, I have heard various public figures opine on the need for a return to a solid civics curriculum in public schools in the United States. In fact, two United States Senators recently introduced legislation, called the Educating for Democracy Act, that would invest $1 billion the development of civics education in our country. In general and particularly in the light how closely our country has veered toward fascism in the past several years, I must concede the point. Apropo of civics education, I submit that learning about the science of vaccines, and vaccine efficacy, is at the moment an integral element of civics education–not to mention part of a general education.
So here you are. There are other materials on this site about vaccine–just search vaccine or vaccination.
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.
“Graces: In Roman mythology, the Gratiae, goddesses who embodied beauty and charm. Called by the Greeks the Charites, they were, by some accounts, named Aglaia (Brilliance), Thalia (the Flowering), and Euphrosyne (Joy), though their names and even their number varied. Although they were probably very early spirits of vegetation, they did not in classical times have any cult of importance. They are best known from their many appearances in art.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the lesson plan on the Latin word root, which mean, respectively, thousand and thousandth. I open this lesson with this worksheet on the noun century. Here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the primary work of this lesson.
As you can see, these are very productive roots in English, yielding words like millennium and millipede. As I look at this lesson plan, I see that I intended to write two separate worksheets for these two roots. There are two separate listings for these roots, but I don’t find, in the dictionary that informs this work, a separate word list for milli. In any case, these documents are, as the bulk of the material posted here, in Microsoft Word. So, it you wanted to add millimeter to the list of words to analyze and define, you can.
In any case, depending on the students you serve, there is plenty of room in this lesson for a freewheeling discussion on mill and milli, whether it is important to know both, and why.
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.
“Involve for Entail. ‘Proof of the charges will involve his dismissal.’ Not at all; it will entail it. To involve is, literally, to infold, not to bring about, nor cause to ensue. An unofficial investigation, for example, may involve character and reputation, but the ultimate consequence is entailed. A question, in the parliamentary sense, may involve a principal; its settlement one way or another may entail expense, or injury to interests. An act may involve one’s honor and entail disgrace.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
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