Category Archives: English Language Arts

This category contains domain-specific material–reading and writing expository prose, interpreting literature etc.–designed to meet the Common Core standards in English language arts while at the same time being flexible enough to meet the needs of diverse and idiosyncratic learners.

Henry David Thoreau

On a snowy Vermont morning, here is a Henry David Thoreau along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ll assume that I needn’t belabor the continuing relevance to Thoreau’s work–I think Walden, or Life in the Woods is still taught in some high school classrooms. It might be worth taking a look, in these times, at some of his political and philosophical work–particularly “Civil Disobedience.” Moreover, it doesn’t take much work to help students develop their own understanding of the connections between Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In any case, it’s difficult to avoid Thoreau’s influence in social justice and peace movements around the world.

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.

Geometric Art

“Geometric Art: A term associated with a style of early Greek art (ca. 1000-700 B.C.) in which decoration is formed of angular lines and shapes. Vase painting is the chief expression of Greek geometric style art. Also used to describe the style of art produced by a variety of prehistoric and primitive cultures.”

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

Word Root Exercise: Lite, Ite

OK, I haven’t published one in some time, so here is a worksheet on the Greek word roots lite and ite. They mean mineral, rock, stone, and fossil, which why you find them at the base of words like granite and bauxite.

In other words these are words used in the sciences–and are therefore important for literacy in science classes.

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.

Denis Diderot on Moral Precepts

“There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.”

Denis Diderot

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

Lucrative (adj)

On this Monday morning, it’s the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster; to my surprise, having worked for ten years in an economic-and-finance-themed high school in Lower Manhattan, I somehow hadn’t written a context clues on the adjective lucrative. By any standard, this is a very commonly used word in the the English language, thus one students should know by the time they leave high school.

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.

White Line Engraving

“White Line Engraving: Engraving in which the design is carved into the surface, not raised from it, and which consequently appears as a white design on a black field. A Renaissance invention, but a specialty of the 19th-century wood engraver Thomas Bewick.”

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

The Weekly Text, December 4, 2020: A Lesson Plan on Using the Compound Adjective

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on using the compound adjective. I open this lesson with this parsing sentences for adjectives worksheet. In the event the lesson continues into a second day, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the oxymoron as a rhetorical device.

Moving on to the work, here is the scaffolded worksheet that is at the center of the lesson. To assist students in understanding and completing this work, I have a couple of learning supports–actually, two versions of the same learning support: the first is this word bank of adjectives to use when working to fill in the cloze blank; the second is the same document structured into columns. I wrote the second one because I found I needed to be able to direct kids’ attention to the column where the best word for the cloze blanks resides.

Finally, here is the teacher’s copy (or the parents’ copy, if you like) of the worksheet for ease of teaching this lesson.

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.

Write It Right: Bogus for Counterfeit, or False

“Bogus for Counterfeit, or False. The word is slang; keep it out.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

Distend (vi/vt)

It’s the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster, so here is a context clues worksheet on the verb distend. One uses it both intransitively and transitively. It means, in the context I’ve written for it, “to enlarge from internal pressure : SWELL.” I very nearly let it pass by, but it is a relatively commonly used word in English.

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: Academic Freedom

“academic freedom: The freedom of educators to teach and to conduct research without fear of political reprisal, as well as the freedom of students to learn without fear of indoctrination or intimidation. Academic freedom for scholars involves both rights and responsibilities. Professors who assert their rights and freedoms have a responsibility to base their conclusions on competent scholarship and to present them in a dignified manner. Although they may express their own opinions, they are duty-bound to set forth the contrasting opinions of other scholars and to introduce their students to the best published sources on the topics at issue. In other words, professors may express their own views, but they must do so in a spirit of impartial scholarly inquiry, without imposing them on their students. Correlatively, students have the right to study under the guidance of qualified and unbiased faculty and to express their views without fear of any form of retribution.”

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