Here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on the Islamic Hajj to get kids thinking about our newest neighbors and to help them learn to revise prose. Don’t forget, please, that the good people at Education World give away a yearlong supply of these, free for the taking. I’ve used these to good effect for many years in my classrooms.
And if you find typos in this document, well, repair them! That is the point, after all, of an exercise such as this one.
“The author of this book should be neutered and locked away forever.”
San Juan County Record
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
Here is a reading on Mark Twain and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. It’s a nice little biography and could serve as a concise but informative introduction to this great American writers for young readers.
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.
OK: here is a lesson plan on Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher” along with its reading and worksheet. You’ll notice that the comprehension questions are sparse and simple. However, as with almost everything you will encounter on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Microsoft Word documents which can be exported to a word processor of your preference, or manipulated for your use as it is.
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.
“Lu Hsun: (also romanized as Lu Xun; pseudonym of Chou Shu-jen, 1881-1936) Generally regarded as modern China’s finest writer. Born to a family of traditional scholars, because of the death of his father and a decline in the family fortunes, he was sent to a school that taught Western technical subjects. He later studied Western medicine in Japan, but soon realized that his people needed more than physical healing. He quit his medical studies and turned to literature, returning to China to use his writing to expose the superstitions and injustices of the early Republican period. He his best known for his two collections of short stories, Nahan (generally translated as Call to Arms), published in 1923, and Panghuang (Wandering) published in 1926. His story “A Madman’s Diary” (“K’uang-jen ji-chi) vividly and painfully chronicles the growing realization of the cannibalistic, “dog-eat-dog” nature of Chinese society. “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (“Chu-fu”) is an account of a modern intellectual’s disturbing and eye-opening return to his traditional home for the New Year’s festivities. Painfully aware of the limitations of literature for effecting real change, in 1926 he stopped writing fiction altogether. Translations of his works include Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (1990), The Complete Stories of Lu Xun (1956-60), and Selected Stories of Lu Xun (1980), as well as his seminal scholarly work, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1959).
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Reviewing a book on science, Mrs. Parker wrote, ‘It was written without fear and without research.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
At this moment, in this nation, we currently bear witness people without any brief or expertise in a given subject nonetheless speaking with grotesquely misplaced confidence in their own genius. There is a word for this: bloviating. There is also a term of art to describe it: epistemic trespassing.
In any case, now seems like just about the perfect moment to publish this context clues worksheet on the noun credential. Please do keep in mind that the Latin word root cred means believe. When someone possesses a credential from a reputable (credible, if you like) educational institution, that means they are someone we can believe, rather than a political hack with a big mouth and few brains. If you are interested in going a bit further with this with your students, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root cred itself.
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.
“Magic Realism: Deriving from the metaphysical period of Giorgio de Chirico (see METAPHYSICAL ART) and related to surrealism, magic realism translates everyday experiences into disturbing images by curious juxtapositions of sharply painted elements. Balthus and Peter Blume are magic realists. Also called precise realism, sharp focus 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
Moving right along, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Good Ship Contessa.”
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on perhaps the best-known of Aesop’s Fables, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Here is the scan of the illustrations and questions with which to conduct the investigation of this case. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key.
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.
Because this Cultural Literacy worksheet on encryption has tended to qualify as high-interest material, I have tagged it as such. Keeping secrets, it turns out, is of particular fascination to adolescents.
Who knew?!
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.
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