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.

Armament (n)

Because it turns up often enough in the social studies curriculum, I found it necessary some years back to write this context clues worksheet on the noun armament. It’s most commonly used, I guess, in its plural form, so this worksheet may present, as an aside, an opportunity to assist students in developing deeper a understanding of the difference between singular and plural nouns.

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.

Claribel Alegria

“Claribel Alegria: (1924-2018) Salvadoran writer, born in Nicaragua. Alegria has published poetry, novelas, and novels. Her work ranges from the intimate lyric to agonized denunciation of the horrors that have beset Central America. Her Sobrevivo (1978) won the Casa de las Americas award in poetry. She excels at a narrative poetry that that is compact, tender, fanciful, and even fantastic, Alegria deals with love, solitude, family life, and injustice from a political and feminist stance, as in La mujer del Rio Sampul (1987; tr Woman of the River, 1990). She has coauthored many books with her husband, Darwin J. Flakoll, particularly testimonial accounts of the Nicaraguan revolution and the lives of Salvadoran women. Cenizas de Izalco (1966; tr Ashes of Izalco, 1989) is a recreation of the peasant uprising of 1932. Luisa en el pais de la realidad (1987; tr Luisa in Realityland, 1987) is an experimental novel.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

Everyday Edit: Pablo Picasso

Here, in observation of Hispanic History Month 2019, is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Pablo Picasso. If you like this kind of exercise, the good people at Education World very generously offer at no charge a year’s supply of them–that hyperlink will take you to them.

If you find errors in this document…well, then you’re doing good work! Finding and correcting copy errors is kind of the point of this material.

E.H. Gombrich on the Origins of Language

“Do you know what else these cavemen invented? Can’t you guess? They invented talking; they invented having real conversations with one another, using words. Of course animals also make noises—they can cry out when they feel pain and make warning calls when danger threatens, but they don’t have names for things as human beings do. And prehistoric people were the first creatures to do so. They invented something else that was wonderful too: pictures. Many of these can still be seen today, painted on the walls of caves. No painter alive today could do better. The animals they depict don’t exist anymore, they were painted so long ago. Elephants with long thick coats of hair and great, curving tusks—wooly mammoths—and other Ice Age animals.”

Excerpted from: Gombrich, E.H. Trans. Caroline Mustill. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Adduce

“Adduce (verb) To bring up as proof or an example; introduce for consideration or discussion; cite. Adjective: adducible, adduceable.

‘Sir Arthur Quiller Couch (‘Q’)…adduced the whole body of English literature in order to maintain that American literature was a provincial appendage and that its most distinguished litterateurs proved the primacy of the English language bye being well within the mainstream of the English of England.’ Alastair Cooke, in On Mencken.”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

Pierre de Fermat

OK, if you have some more advanced math students on your hands, this reading on Pierre de Fermat–with an excursus on his Last Theorem–might be of some use to you. This vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet accompanies the reading.

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.

Libido

I’m not sure where this reading on the Freudian concept of libido and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet fit into the curriculum. Health education seems the logical choice, but if you’re an English teacher trying to teach students to speak in a more sophisticated manner of, uh, intimate affairs, this might be the material for that.

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.

Achaeans

Achaeans: In Homer, the name by which the Greeks of heroic times spoke of themselves. Culturally we would call them Mycenaeans. They have been identified both with the Ahhiyawa, mentioned by the Hittites as one of their western neighbors, and the Akawasha, listed by the Egyptians as Peoples of the Sea. In historical times the name was limited to the Greeks of southwest Thessaly and the northern Peloponnese.

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

Euripides on Learning and Youth

“Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead to the future.”

Euripides (480-406 B.C.)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

Cultural Literacy: E Pluribus Unum

Finally on this Monday morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Latin phrase e pluribus unum, the motto of the United States, appearing on the nation’s great seal. Unfortunately, this elegant phrase was never codified as the nation’s motto, so in 1956, in a counter-enlightenment move, “In God We Trust” was passed into law at the official motto of the United States.

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.