It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective histrionic. This is a solid modifier that is so commonly used in English that high school students probably ought to learn 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.
“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so I developed this context clues worksheet on the noun bromide just now. I won’t argue that this is a word high school students need to know; at the same time, given the debauched state of our political discourse, I think this is a word whose time is now.
That said, the current administration obviously prefers a thumb-in-the-eye style of communications. Given that this word means (outside of describing a binary chemical compound of bromine and something else) “a commonplace or tiresome person: BORE” and “a commonplace or hackneyed statement or notion,” a political leader who, after 130,000 deaths and rising in a pandemic says everything is just fine, isn’t just indulging in a weakness for the commonplace idiocies of bromides, he is showing delusion, mendacity, and cruelty.
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.
“Sheffield Plate: Objects made during the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries in England using a thin sheet of silver fused to a sheet of copper.”
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
Tagged art/architecture/design
English teachers, do you teach Jane Austen? I’ve worked in a couple of high schools, and I don’t recall that she was taught in either place. I put together this reading on Jane Austen and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet for a student who had seen the 1995 film Clueless, discovered that it was based on Jane Austen’s novel Emma, and wanted to know more about that novel, a comedy of manners.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on Otto von Bismarck. I can’t imagine how one teaches or understands the history of modern Europe, and Germany over the past two centuries, or even, arguably, modern conservatism, without knowing something about the Iron Chancellor. This is a full page worksheet, suitable for independent practice (i.e. homework).
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.
“Antecedent: The noun to which a pronoun refers. A pronoun and its antecedent must agree in person, number, and gender. Michael and his teammates moved off campus.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
It’s Merriam-Webster’s word of the day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the verb emulate. It’s only used transitively, so don’t forget your direct object: One must emulate something or someone.
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.
Because it was recently Merriam-Webster’s word of the day, in the interests of my own ongoing cognitive agility (like everyone else, I am not getting any younger), I wrote this context clues worksheet on the noun legerdemain. It means both “sleight of hand” and “a display of skill or adroitness.” It’s probably not anyone’s idea of a word kids really must know by their high school graduation.
So I almost skipped developing this worksheet. Yet, it nagged at me. At this point, I have spent my career as a teacher in the service of struggling students. One of the things I noticed my charges struggled with, year in and year our, was abstractions and concepts. Since most kids know what magic and card tricks are, I saw an opportunity to show them both the abstract and the concrete using this word. Parenthetically, I think one of the reasons so many struggling learners tend to tussle with abstractions is that they have been taught not to trust their perceptions. Here, I submit, is a word that can help them learn to know and trust the accuracy of their perceptions because they possess the relatively simple prior knowledge to understand it.
Or maybe not. In any case, I’m just sayin’.
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.
“I once said cynically of a politician, ‘He’ll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.’”
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
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