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.

Cultural Literacy: Sociology

OK, it’s Monday again, and cool and damp in southwestern Vermont. Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on sociology if you need your students to understand (and who doesn’t I guess, particularly those of us charged with teaching the social sciences) the concept and academic discipline.

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.

Rotten Rejections: And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street

[This, of course, refers to Dr. Seuss’s 1937 book, which refers to Mulberry Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was the good doctor’s home, rather than the famous street in Little Italy in Manhattan.]

“…too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.”

Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.

The Weekly Text, October 25, 2019: A Trove of Documents for Teaching Vocabulary in the Culinary Arts

Circumstances have emerged in my new job that have impelled me into one of my favorite tasks as a teacher, namely, creating differentiated instruction. This week, I began work on a course of study for a student who is interested in pursuing a career in the culinary arts. This enterprise begins with the construction of a lexicon of words, adjectives, nouns, and verbs, to be specific.

So, this week’s Text is a trove of initial documents for this endeavor. Here is the lexicon that informs this early phase of this work. You’ll find most of the words in that lexicon on these four worksheets on adjectives, this set of four worksheets on nouns, and these four worksheets on verbs. If you want to make your own worksheets, then you might need these four different worksheet templates that form the basis of all this work.

As with virtually everything on Mark’s Text Terminal, all of these documents are in Microsoft Word; ergo, you may adjust them to your students’ needs. If you’ve ever considered commenting on this blog, may I ask you to do so viz this material? I am really curious if it has utility elsewhere, or (gulp!) merit.

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.

Public Art

public art: Most artwork created from the dawn of history has been public art in the sense that it was located in places of public gathering or worship, such as Greek temple sculpture and medieval church frescoes. Since the 1960s, artists’ appetites for creating works too large to be exhibited in galleries or museums, coupled with government-sponsored initiatives, have resulted in the placement of large, publicly funded sculptures in many parks and plazas, with various degrees of critical and popular success, Public uproar over Richard Serra’s site-specific Tilted Arc in Manhattan eventually forced its removal. Other artists created earthworks, such as Christo’s Running Fence, which required vast amounts of open space. See MEDIA ART.”

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

Asthma

Health teachers–as well as my erstwhile colleagues in the South Bronx, the asthma capital of New York City, and maybe the world–might find useful this reading on asthma and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies 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.

Term of Art: Orthographic Awareness

orthographic awareness: An individual’s command of the sound-letter relationship,. As children learn to write, their approaches to spelling change as they become more aware of sounds and letters. In the beginning, children often spell very simply (such as ‘bt’ for ‘boat’). As they get older they may apply conventions of spelling but still misspell (‘bote’ for ‘boat’).

With more exposure to written language, as they become more proficient readers and learn specific spelling patterns, young writers begin to apply more sophisticated spelling patterns (‘boat’ for ‘boat’). Individuals with learning disabilities who have underdeveloped orthographic awareness often have problems with spelling.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

Patriarch (n)

OK! It’s Friday again, and a in-service half-day in this district to boot. Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun patriarch. I can’t remember why I wrote this in the first place (there is, elsewhere on Mark’s Text Terminal, a worksheet on the Latin roots pat and patri, which probably ought to have sufficed for this), but I do think it’s a word high schoolers ought to know.

All of these words mean something related to father, incidentally.

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.

Amber

amber: Fossilized pine resin. It was much appreciated in antiquity not only for its beauty but for its supposed magical properties–of attracting small particles when warmed and rubbed. The major source in Europe is along the southeast coast of the Baltic and North Sea, and minor ones in even in southeast Europe. However, the distribution of finds strongly supports the view that there was an important trade in amber following specific routes up the Elbe and Vistula, across the upper Danube to the Brenner Pass, and so down to the Adriatic and the countries bordering it. Other objects and ideas travelled by the same route, which made it an important factor in European prehistory. The trade began in the Early Bronze Age but expanded greatly as a result of the Mycenaeans’ interest. Even Britain was brought into this trading area, as witnessed by amber spacer plates in barrows of the Wessex Culture. Later, amber was very popular with the Iron Age peoples of Italy, particularly the Picenes.

Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Two Learning Supports on Abbreviations and Symbols

While I don’t mean to say that the method doesn’t have universal application–it does, and I think it’s probably the best way to build literacy, particularly in procedural knowledge of English prose–I think Hochman and Wexler’s The Writing Revolution curriculum might have particularly effective application in the school in which I presently serve.

So, I have returned to working up some new curriculum for social studies base on it. This morning I made two learning supports, the first one on abbreviations and the second one on symbols. Both documents are in Microsoft Word (as is just everything here at Mark’s Text Terminal), so you can alter them to your students’ needs.

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.

Joseph Louis Lagrange on Antoine Lavoisier

“[Remark the day after the guillotining of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier on 8 May 1794]: ‘Il ne leur a fallu qu’un moment pour faire tomber cette tete, et cent annees, peut-etre, ne suffiront pas pour en reproduire une semblable.’

It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a similar one.”

Joseph Louis Lagrange

Quoted int J.B. Delambre, “Eloge de Lagrange,” Memoires de l’Institut (1812)

Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.