Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on rhyme. This is a half-page reading with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. In other words, a simple yet clear introduction to the concept.
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.
Happy New Year!
Let’s move right along to the fifth lesson plan of the History of Hip-Hop unit, this one on the birth of the blues in the southern United States, with a particular emphasis on a huge figure in global culture, the blues artist nonpareil Robert Johnson. I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Deep South. The main work of this lesson is this reading on Robert Johnson along with its accompanying comprehension worksheet. Finally, here are the lyrics to one of his most famous songs, “Sweet Home Chicago,” now a blues standard, which I play for students during the lesson.
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.
OK, here is a worksheet on the verb phrase can’t afford as it is used with an infinitive. I can’t afford to waste time producing curricular materials I will very likely never use.
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.
Happy New Year!
I got out my computer this morning and ended up, as I often do, working some on this blog. Long story short, I have all the posts–twenty-four of them–set up in my drafts folder for Black History Month. And as long as I’m here, I may as well post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on science fiction. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. Just the basics.
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.
“He is, of course, a top-notch poet, and his bittersweet poems can indeed make us weak, make us feel incomplete. In 2002 he became the second living and first black poet to have his selected poems published in England in the Penguin Classics series. He is Jamaican by birth, and though he has resided for most of his adult life in England, where he took a university degree in sociology, he writes in Jamaican Creole. Not a dialect, not strictly a ‘patois,’ either, and not a mere post-colonial version of Standard English, Jamaican Creole is a language created out of hard necessity by African slaves from 17th century British English and West African, mostly Ashanti, language groups, with a lexical admixture from the Caribe and Arawak natives of the island. It is a powerfully expressive, flexible, and, not surprisingly, musical vernacular, sustained and elaborated upon for over four hundred years by the descendants of those slaves, including those who, like LKJ, have migrated out of Jamaica in the second great diaspora for England, Canada, and the United States. Fortunately, its grammar and orthography like that of pre-18th century British English, have never been rigidly formalized or fixed by an academy of notables or any authoritative dictionary. It is, therefore, a living, organically evolving language intimately connected to the lived experience of its speakers.”
Excerpted from: Banks, Russell, “Introduction,” in Johnson, Linton Kwesi. Mi Revalueshenary Fren. Port Townshend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged black history, fiction/literature, poetry, professional development
OK, once again from the pages of Paul Brians’ book (to which he allows no-cost access at his Washington State University webpage) Common Errors in English Usage (he’s up to a third edition, I believe), here is a worksheet on the use of the plural nouns issues and problems. This is a full-page document with a six-sentence reading and ten modified cloze exercises.
As usual, Professor Brians promotes good usage by way of a short but punchy reading on the historical linguistics, so to speak, of these two words.
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.
“No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has ‘The Truth.’ To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
Here is a worksheet on the verb appear as it is used with a infinitive. I often don’t appear to know what I’m doing where curricular design is concerned.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on purple prose in both written and oral communication. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of one phrase (a fragment, really, possibly the first I’ve seen in this material in 15 years of working with it) and one short sentence, followed by two short comprehension questions. If your students understand the adjective “ornate” and “flowery,” this worksheet will do the job; otherwise, some vocabulary building might be prudent.
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.
“subtractive bilingualism: A description of a bilingual program in which students become proficient in a second language, which replaces their first language in the curriculum. Contrast additive bilingualism.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
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