Given current history, now seems like a good time to post this reading on autoimmune disease and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
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.
“Vignette: An ornament of leaves and tendrils; the flourishes around a capital letter in a manuscript; a small decoration or embellishment found in beginning or ending sections of a book or manuscript; a small picture or illustration not enclosed by a definite border but shading off into the surrounding page.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
OK, finally for today, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root ocul. It means, you will all but certainly be unsurprised to hear, eye. This is a very productive root in English, and is at the basis of words students really must know.
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.
“Endeavor, first, to broaden your children’s sympathies and, by satisfying their daily needs, to bring love and kindness into such unceasing contact with their impressions and their activity, that these sentiments may be engrafted in their hearts.”
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) as Quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
The amount of research on reading is voluminous. Even after reading what I consider and exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) amount of this material across a period of 15 years, I still barely scratched the surface of this body of literature. At the classroom level, however, teaching practice demands keen attention to two things: decoding–i.e. recognizing the correspondence between letters and their sounds, known as phonemic awareness, and comprehension–i.e. understanding the meanings of words and applying that understanding, in synthesis, to the entire body of a text to understand it.
English is a tough language to decode. One person who recognized this and wanted to do something about it was the Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was sufficiently concerned about the odd vagaries of English spelling that he actually bequeathed money in his estate for spelling reform. Indeed, there is a form of orthography known as the Shavian Alphabet (Aside: Shavian is both an adjective and a noun meaning, basically, related to George Bernard Shaw and his writings.)
In any case, one of the well-known representations of the challenges of English phonics, often erroneously (it first appeared, apparently, in a letter from Charles Ollier to Leigh Hunt) attributed to Shaw, is the word ghoti. It is possible, using English phonics, to pronounce this word as fish: take the gh from tough (i.e. f), the o from the plural women (i.e. short i), and the ti from action (i.e. sh).
Over the years, when I had a few minutes left in a class period, generally at the beginning of the school year, I would trot this out for the struggling readers and English language learners I served. After explaining–in summary of course–much of the foregoing in this essay, I would point out to students that if they struggled with English phonics and their representation in orthography, they were in very good company: George Bernard Shaw, Nobel prizewinning author whose plays are still routinely performed today.
This year, I finally wrote out this lesson plan on ghoti for use in a full class period. Here is the accompanying worksheet and the teacher’s copy of same. I added a few words, which I grabbed somewhere along the line. Now it’s yours if you can use it.
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.
“When did the Iranian government condemn writer Salman Rushdie to death? Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence against the author of The Satanic Verses on February 15, 1989. Rushdie has been in hiding since.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
[Over the years in my classrooms, it was hard to miss the fact that students who struggled with reading, particularly the students of Asian Pacific descent I served, would nonetheless exhaust my school library’s supply of anime. In researching this post, I learned that Bakin’s best-known book, Hakkenden, has been adapted to anime. For that reason, I have tagged this as high-interest material.]
“Kyokutei Bakin: (1767-1849) Japanese fiction writer of the late-Tokugawa period. Bakin was among the most gifted writers of his time, and succeeded in establishing himself as a serious writer in an age dominated by the lowbrow entertainment genre of Gesaku. Bakin is best known for an extraordinary tour-de-force, Hakkenden (1814-1832), whose title translates, improbably, as “Eight Canine Biographies.” This high-flown historical romance of noble vengeance, with its thickly applied Confucianist morality of virtue rewarded and vice punished, ranks as Japan’s longest literary narrative. Hakkenden has retained its popularity in contemporary Japan, albeit in abridged modern editions.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Don’t forget that April is Asian Pacific American History Month. Mark’s Text Terminal takes pains to observe four themed history months (Hispanic Heritage, Black or African-American, Women’s, and Asian Pacific American) each year. You can link to materials related to any of these commemorations by using the tags in the word clouds at the top right of this site.
Here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on the bombing of Hiroshima.
To give credit where it is so abundantly due, please don’t forget that the generous people at Education World give away a entire year’s supply of Everyday Edit worksheets.
“Chronicle (noun): A chronological record of events or facts, especially a historical narrative or register without interpretation or comment; account; story. Noun: chronicler; verb: chronicle.
‘The Franks, as a family, came to an end, and, fittingly enough, thought the diarist, so did her chronicle of their effort to go sensibly on as themselves, in spite of everything.’ Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
As I mentioned the previous posts in which I published these documents (and you can learn more about these materials in the “About Posts & Texts” page on the homepage of this blog, just above the banner photograph), I began to contrive lessons from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book The Order of Things just about the time I left public education last month. So, because I have only used these materials in the classroom a couple of times, they remain somewhat tentative.
Nonetheless, I wrote 30 of them, and have the document templates prepared to write 30 more–at least. If you’ve ever considered commenting on Mark’s Text Terminal, I would be very much obliged to hear what you think of these lessons. I intended them for emergent and struggling readers as a means to experience directly the task of reading and comprehending two symbolic systems (i.e. numbers and letters) at the same time.
So, here is a lesson plan on admission (and readmission after the Civil War) of states to the Union, along with its reading and comprehension worksheet. The worksheet is relatively short; like most other things on this blog, however, it is in Microsoft Word and therefore easily manipulable to your needs. I suppose, as I look at these, they have the potential for transfer into cross-disciplinary instruction.
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.
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