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.

The Weekly Text, October 16, 2015: A Learning Support on Commonly Used Conjunctions

Posted on October 16, 2015 | Leave a comment

Over the years,  many if not most of the high school students I’ve served alerted me to the fact that it isn’t possible to begin a sentence with because. Of course that is incorrect, and it means that no one taught them the use of subordinating conjunctions–probably because this skill isn’t on the high-stakes test du jour. It’s true that this is a moderately tricky area of English usage, but with proper preparation, I believe it is possible to teach the use of all three types of conjunctions–coordinating, subordinating, and correlative–effectively and with ease. To that end, here is a learning support on the most commonly used conjunctions of all three types.

I believe strongly in teaching the parts of speech to struggling learners. Properly planned, units on each part of speech provide a variety of ways to foster and improve literacy. Over the years, I have developed units on all the parts of speech, and they now constitute a nearly yearlong course of study in my English Language Arts classes. The conjunctions unit is the last of them I need to complete, and I’m working on it now. Over time, I’ll post a variety of learning supports from these units on Mark’s Text Terminal.

UPDATE, December 14, 2015: Since I wrote this post, I have revised the learning support it includes three times, the most recently today. In the process of finding the document on my computer to revise it, I discovered that I have a second, more complete learning support for conjunctions in my English Language Arts Support folder. I probably set this one aside because it’s a little too complicated for the students I’m currently serving. In any case, to write a unit around this support is more than I can take on right now. Perhaps you’ll find it useful?

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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The Weekly Text, October 9, 2015: An Exercise on the Greek Word Roots Syn, Sym, Syl, and Sys

Posted on October 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

Because I teach a relatively large population of native Spanish speakers (who are, of course, bilingual, which often makes their low levels of literacy confounding to me), I tend to assign Latin word roots to freshmen, and Greek word roots to sophomores. It goes without saying that I aim to show freshmen, by way of Latin word roots, the commonalities between their native tongue and English–which is, of course, Latin and its roots.

Accordingly, when I publish word root worksheets, I’ll alternate between Latin and Greek roots. This week’s Text is a worksheet on the Greek word roots syn, sym, syl, and sys. As you can see, these are very productive roots–they mean together and same–which are at the base of a number of key high school vocabulary words, not the least of which, for both students and teachers, is synthesis.

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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The Weekly Text, October 2, 2015: A Lesson Plan on Genocide

Posted on October 2, 2015 | Leave a comment

We teachers in Lower Manhattan are fortunate to have the Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in our precincts, and in most cases within walking distance. The Museum is diverse (as I write this, it is running an exhibition on design called “Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism”) but its Core Exhibition addresses the 100-year-or-so period in Europe, and the Jewish experience there, surrounding the Holocaust.

The Museum is generous with opportunities for New York City public schools to attend exhibits and educational programs. Their programs are sophisticated and students report back, even those alienated from school, that they found the experience quite meaningful.

This is a reading and writing lesson on genocide designed to equip students with prior knowledge of a key concept that will enable them to better understand the context of their museum visit. There are two do-now exercises, so if you’re unfamiliar with their use, you’ll need the Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual as well as the explanation of asterisks in the About Weekly Texts page on the banner above this entry. Although I originally taught this as a stand-alone special topic lesson, I have incorporated it into a larger Freshman Global Studies unit, so the lesson plan lacks standards to rationalize it. Again, if you look at the About Weekly Texts page, you’ll find typescripts (from which you can copy and paste standards) of the complete English Language Arts and Social Studies Common Core Standards.

Genocide is nobody’s idea of a pleasant topic for conversation;  United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has aptly called it it, in her book of the same name, “a problem from hell.” As context for a visit to A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, a relatively deep understanding of genocide and its impetuses is de rigeur. This lesson, I hope, will help students develop their own understanding of that context.

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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The Weekly Text, September 25, 2015: A Learning Support on the Verb To Be

Posted on September 25, 2015 | Leave a comment

In my experience, most students at some point struggle with the idea, both in theory and practice, of subject-verb agreement. I worked my way through college and graduate school tutoring students in writing, and more than half the time, students were referred to the writing center for subject-verb agreement issues in their prose.

This week’s Text is a simple learning support that conjugates the verb to be and explains one way of making sure that subjects and verbs agree. The school year has started, so this is a quick entry between adjusting instructional materials for this year’s freshmen, writing an IEP, and preparing lessons for my upcoming absence on account of jury duty. Are you this busy?

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.

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The Weekly Text, September 18, 2015: A Lesson Plan on the Executive Skills and the Medieval Commonplace Book

Posted on September 18, 2015 | 2 comments

Students with learning challenges almost invariably present to their teachers with executive skills issues. How might teachers in their content areas, while conveying the facts and skills on which students will be tested, build opportunities into our lessons for students to have useful experiences in learning to organize themselves? Since some colleagues and I conducted a professional inquiry into executive skills a few years back, the possibility of this kind of synthetic unit, using abstract content to teach concrete, real-world living skills has nagged at me. This Weekly Text is a prototype for the kind of learning activity I imagine. I use the word prototype deliberately. I have never used this lesson on the commonplace book in the classroom.

We expect students to manage larger and larger amounts information, but at least at the school in which I work, we offer no formal instruction or training to assist students in discovering and developing their own methods of organization. For students with even mild executive skills challenges, this is a devastating omission. But what would we use to teach organization, and how?

You can click through the link above to learn the basics on the commonplace book from Wikipedia’s good page (from which I was edified to learn that by “the seventeenth century, commonplacing had become a recognized practice that was formally taught to college students”). Fortunately, cloud computing gives students and teachers a variety of formats in which to start a digital-age commonplace book. Evernote and Dropbox are two of the better-known places to start and maintain a commonplace book.

I don’t know your school’s policy is on smartphones, but both Evernote and Dropbox offer apps on the major mobile applications platforms. I believe that the smartphone has potential to serve as a powerful learning adjunct for struggling learners. If your school permits the use of smartphones in the classroom (mine, for reasons that strike me as both foolish and ignorant, if that’s possible, doesn’t), then this lesson has room to help students learn to use their smartphones to aid them in their school work in both learning and organization.

So, the Commonplace Book Lesson Plan is a reading and writing lesson that introduces students to the concept of keeping information (at least at the beginning) in one place. I expect as I begin using this lesson, I’ll find ways it might be adjusted or adapted for greater sophistication and complexity, e.g. teaching students to create, use and organize useful filing systems, so that it can be used along a continuum that matches students’ abilities.

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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The Weekly Text: September 11, 2015: Five Parsing Sentences Worksheets on Nouns

Posted on September 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

On this sad anniversary, I am at work, right next to Ground Zero, on Trinity Place between Cedar and Thames in Lower Manhattan.

Here are five parsing sentences worksheets that you might find helpful in teaching your students a variety of things: what nouns are, what the parts of a complete sentence are, how to pick sentences apart by identifying their constituent parts, and how those parts relate to one another syntactically.

This is the first time I’ve posted parsing sentences worksheets, so I attach the Parsing Sentences Worksheets Users’ Manual. If you haven’t previously used worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, and you’re wondering why there are asterisks where subject nouns and pronouns should be, take a quick look at the About Weekly Texts page linked to just above the photo.

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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The Weekly Text: September 4, 2015: Two Context Clues Worksheets on Ally

Posted on September 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

School begins Tuesday, September  8th here in New York City (and as Joey Ramone once said, the sun is out, and I want some!), so I’ll quickly publish these two takes on the word ally, as a noun and a verb, that I use to assist students in understanding these oft-used words. I emphasize to students that these are fundamental terms in their social studies vocabulary. You might want to take a look at the About Weekly Texts page above for information on the format of these two worksheets (what’s with the asterisks?), as well as the Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual. I generally mention in passing the word allied both as an adjective and past tense of the verb. Does allied need its own 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.

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Clive James on Humanism

Posted on August 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

“Gradually, I realized that I had been looking in the wrong place. As a journalist and critic, a premature post-modernist, I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers (in my dreams, I astonish the Olympic medalist Greg Louganis) as if they were practicing the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and often the sore point reveals where the real point is. Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection between them. Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it. In the connection between all the outlets of the creative impulse in mankind, humanism made itself manifest, and to be concerned with understanding and maintaining that intricate linkage necessarily entailed an opposition to any political order that worked to weaken it.”

Excerpted from: Cultural Amnesia (New York: Norton, 2008), “Introduction,” p. xix.

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The Weekly Text: August 21, 2015: Two Worksheets on the Homophones Two, Too, and To

Posted on August 21, 2015 | Leave a comment

This week’s text is two short worksheets to help students deal with the commonly confused and misused homophones two, too and to. These are modified cloze exercises, and therefore mostly self explanatory and easy to use. In any case, here is the Homophone Worksheets Users’ Manual to clarify the use of these materials.

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.

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The Weekly Text: August 14, 2015: An Exercise on the Latin Word Root Bell

Posted on August 14, 2015 | Leave a comment

Here, at last, is what I hope I can focus on sufficiently to sustain as the gravamen of Mark’s Text Terminal, The Weekly Text. In each of these weekly installments I’ll post something I’ve developed to assist struggling students in building their literacy skills. I make no promises–the school year can get quite busy–but I will do what I can to publish something new every week.

This inaugural Weekly Text is a vocabulary building worksheet that derives from the Latinate word root bell. Bell means war and is at the root of several words in English (i.e. bellicose, belligerent, and, as below, antebellum). I imagine most educators would agree that learned people ought to understand and know how to use these words. Unsurprisingly, most of these words have cognates in the Romance languages, as antebellum does. If you’re teaching English language learners, the Latinate word root is a bridge between English and Spanish.

These words are mostly abstract, but carry a hint, as so many Latin nouns themselves do, of the concrete. There is room in the lesson or lessons one might write to attend this worksheet for an exploration of the differences between concrete and abstract nouns. Furthermore, there is room for a discussion on the concepts represented here, and some questions teachers might ask are: What is war? What does war look like? What is the difference between war and peace? What is bellicose speech and behavior? How can a society know, by the bellicose or belligerent behavior of some of its members, that it is at risk of going to war?  Finally, I generally make sure students understand the difference between belligerent as an adjective and a noun, because in the latter case, the word can turn up in a sentence like The Axis and the Allies were the belligerents in World War II. In this sentence, students need to understand that belligerents means combatants.

Finally, here’s the Word Root Worksheets Users’ Manual document for a fuller exegesis of this type of worksheet.

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.

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