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.

A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “Bankward Ho!”

Since these continue to be a very popular item on Mark’s Text Terminal, here is a complete lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Bankward Ho!”

I start this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks.” To conduct this lesson, of course, you will need this PDF of the illustration and questions that are the center of the “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.

Book of Answers: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“What family’s and what village’s history are recounted in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude? The novel tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the village of Macondo.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

The Weekly Text, September 27, 2019, Hispanic Heritage Month 2019 Week II: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Augusto Pinochet

This week’s Text, in Mark’s Text Terminal’s ongoing observance of National Hispanic Heritage Month 2019, is a reading on Augusto Pinochet and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Pinochet–along with Trujillo, the Somoza family, and in general a disturbingly long list of despots–is one of the great villains of Hispanic History. When I was in high school, Pinochet was kind of our version of the bogeyman.

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.

Intarsia

“Intarsia: Decoration of a wood surface by inlaying a design in such materials as mother-of-pearl, metal, ivory, etc.”

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

Term of Art: Auteur Theory

“auteur theory: A theory of film criticism and analysis that derived from the writings of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and others, which appeared in the influential magazine Cahiers du cinema in the early 1950s. In an article printed in Cahiers in 1954, Truffaut proposed “la politique des auteurs” in an effort to free directors from traditional script-dominated films. Truffaut and his colleagues, who were to become the vanguard of the New Wave, held that, although films are collaborative efforts, they should ultimately bear the artistic stamp of the director, whose personal vision creates the film as an author (auteur) would create a book. The theory was first championed in the U.S, by the critic Andrew Sarris.”

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

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.