Category Archives: English Language Arts

Here is something new at Mark’s Text Terminal: a reading and analysis lesson plan derived from the text of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book The Order of Things. I’ll be writing up a summary of this work and its purpose on the “About Posts & Texts” page, which you can click through to just above the banner photograph. I am still thinking through how to describe the object of these lessons (I have 30 of them outlined at this point), but I can say this much: these worksheets are an attempt to provide students practice, as a road to developing their own understanding of what former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called the work of “symbolic analysts.”

This first lesson plan is on the admission of the first 13 of the United States. The worksheet for this lesson calls upon students to read and analyze both language and numbers (two sets of symbols, in other words) in order to answer a series of relatively simple comprehension questions. There is a lot of room to alter this material to you and your students’ needs; as always, these documents are in Microsoft Word, so they are easily manipulable.

More of these are forthcoming, as is a more extensive explanation of them and rationale for their use, as above, on the “About Posts & Texts” page.

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.