“Illumination: Ornamental initial, pattern, or illustration painted on the vellum or parchment leaves of a manuscript as an adornment of the text. The paint is water soluble, with an egg base. See MINIATURE PAINTING.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Here is a worksheet on sorting out the use of the noun perspective and the adjective prospective. These are a couple of words worth knowing and being able to use properly–especially for high school seniors who are in the process of becoming prospective students at post-secondary institutions. Incidentally, since these are very near homophones, and may indeed sound like homophones to English language learners, I’ve tagged this post as such.
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.
“The five-pointed star, the Pentagram, was a symbol of absolute authority to the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), as early as the third millennium BC. It represented an additional axis or the royal authority reaching out to the four corners of the earth. Later, in classical Greece, it was used as a mystic symbol by Pythagoreans and in early Jewish lore it was associated with Solomon’s Seal, a magical signet ring of King Solomon which gave him the power to command demons and speak to animals. (Confusingly, Solomon’s Seal can also be depicted as a hexagon.)
This Seal of Solomon was revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Indeed an interlinked ribbon version—known as the Seal of Solomon—is used on the Moroccan national flag. Medieval astrologers interpreted the pentagram as a symbol of the five wounds of Christ. However, the symbol dropped out of Christian use, having been co-opted by medieval necromancers and modern witchcraft.
Renaissance occultists made a distinction in the star’s orientation. When pointed upwards the star was good, symbolizing spirit presiding over the four elements of matter. Pointing down it was evil—the sign of the goat of black magic (whose face could be drawn in the star or its beard and horn suggested by the points). Wiccans have adopted the symbol (in its good form) as their emblem, and it is widely used by neo-Pagans, often as a pentacle, within an enclosed circle.”
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.
Here is a reading on Leo Tolstoy and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
Do high school students read Tolstoy–or any of the big Russian authors, for that matter? I prepared these documents last week after a high school chum of mine mentioned in correspondence that he’d read Anna Karenina at our high school. Ours was a somewhat unusual (and unusually small) school, but not that far out of the mainstream–though I did read Richard Brautigan for the first time there.
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.
“High Renaissance Art: Climax of Renaissance art, ca. 1495-1520. In the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, Italian art attained the High Renaissance ideal of harmony and balance within the framework of classical realism.”
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
It’s an important syntactical structure and area of English usage, so I have written several lessons on the predicate adjective; I want students to have this sentence structure and its parts, especially linking verbs, down cold. So, this week’s Text is yet another lesson plan on the predicate adjective.
I open this lesson with this worksheet on the Latinism N.B., or nota bene. The first time I saw this abbreviation on a piece of my Russian language homework in college, I looked it up and mastered its use. It is a phrase students ought to know. This is the scaffolded worksheet on using the predicate adjectives at the center of the lesson, and here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet for ease of teaching this lesson.
There are two learning supports (ultimately, I’d plan to make four, for, again, scaffolded teaching and learning). The first one is organized to provide extra support for students who need it; the second one is less organized and structured and therefore places greater demand on heuristics and the ability to search for just the right word.
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 context clues worksheet on the noun approbation. It means “an act of approving formally or officially: COMMENDATION, PRAISE” and has an adjectival form in approbatory.
Approbation is not exactly the most commonly used word in the English language. That may in fact be its strength in using this document to teach inferring from context as a reading strategy. When students don’t know a word this obscure, in my experience, they derive satisfaction in the act of defining it from the context in which it is embedded. Will your students begin expressing to their friends and siblings about their approbation and disapprobation (which means, unsurprisingly, “the act or state of disapproving : the state of being disapproved : CONDEMNATION”) for menu choices, girlfriends or boyfriends, or musical preferences? Probably not. But they will have an opportunity to practice an important, indeed key, reading comprehension strategy by defining this word from the context in which it appears.
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.
“Culture and Anarchy: (1869) The full title of this work by Matthew Arnold is Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. Arnold felt it was necessary to shake the members of the Victorian middle class, the ‘Philistines,’ out of their smug complacency, and to show them the need for incorporating ‘sweetness and light’ (a phrase taken from Swift’s The Battle of the Books) into their daily lives. The book is known for its definition of a three-tier class structure of Barbarians, Philistines, and the Populace. Arnold also opposed Hellenism, which is concerned with beauty, knowledge, and imaginative free play, to Hebraism, which involves ethics, responsibility, and self-control. He felt that society was too Hebraic, and should show greater respect for ‘culture,’ which he defines famously as a canon of ‘the best that has been thought and said,’ but also as an action, ‘the study and pursuit of perfection.’ He believed culture should be disseminated throughout society with an aim toward social equality, though his own elite position blinded him to biases about race, sex, and class, and the destructive homogenization implied by his claim that individual perfection depends on the realization of the state as the ideal expression of community.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots dent and denti. Would you be terribly surprised that they mean, respectively, tooth and teeth?
This is a very productive root in English, and one particularly useful for student considering healthcare careers, especially, uh, dentistry.
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.
“Libertarian, n. One who is compelled by the evidence to believe in free-will, and whose will is therefore free to reject that doctrine.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, united states history
 | 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.