Here is a worksheet on the Greek word root bio. It means, simply, life.
There is no need to belabor the productivity of this root–it forms the basis of a lot of basic words in English: biography, biology, and biodegradable, to name just three.
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 learning support on using hyphens and dashes. If you scroll down about 17 posts below this one, you’ll find another learning support simply on hyphenation. As always, Paul Brians does a nice job of presenting the key issues on these forms of punctuation.
Incidentally, if you like Paul Brians’ work, stay tuned here for more of it; I drafted a little over one hundred worksheets using text from his book Common Errors in English Usage–which Professor Brians, amazingly, has made available in its entirety on the Washington State University website. Just punch that hyperlink–and you’re there!
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 reading on robotic surgery along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is an Intellectual Devotional reading, so the worksheet is a two-pager with the standard (for Mark’s Text Terminal) eight vocabulary words, eight comprehension questions, and three “Additional Facts” questions.
If memory serves, I wrote this for a colleague who was running an after-school robotics program at a school in which I served in the North Bronx. I’m fairly certain I’ve never used 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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on carbon. This is a half-page worksheet with three questions. In other words, the barest of introductions to the topic. I believe I wrote this to accompany a lesson on carbon dating for a co-taught freshman global studies class in New York City.
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.
Last but not least today, here is a worksheet on differentiating us and we when writing sentences with these two first-person plural pronouns. As you can see, the work here involves, basically, understanding the difference between the nominative and objective cases when using personal pronouns. Like any of the documents that you find on this blog under the header Common Errors in English Usage, the supporting text for this worksheet is derived from Paul Brians’ book of the same name, which he has generously made available at no cost at the Washington State University website.
This worksheet contains Professor Brians’ text with ten modified cloze exercises to give students a chance to try their hand at using these pronouns. As always, or almost always, this document is formatted in Microsoft Word, so you can alter it to your class’s needs.
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 worksheet on the Latin word root port. It means “to carry.” Accordingly, you’ll find it at the base of frequently used English words like import, export, deport, and transport (which also contains the Latin root trans–across, through, change, beyond) and even comportment, which arises from the verb comport, “to behave in a manner conformable to what is right, proper, or expected.”
As we might put it more figuratively, comportment means how one carries oneself. As I recall, when I was in elementary school in the 1960s, my report card carried a section on comportment.
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 Belated July 4th! In observance of the holiday, here is a reading on Thomas Jefferson along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As most people understand, Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence of the British colonies in North America. A deeper dive into the origins of Jefferson’s rhetorical style in the Declaration shows that it is mostly a summary of issues John Locke raised in his Two Treatises of Government, particularly in the second.
Whenever I think of Jefferson, to be honest, a quote that has stuck with me from my high school reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre. He is one of the great quotable authors of the twentieth century. This one comes from Breakfast of Champions (rather than, as I thought all these years, from Wampeters, Foma, and Granfallooons, a book of Vonnegut’s essays and reviews that bears a rereading): “Thomas Jefferson High School…His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.” Vonnegut never backed down from this observation, as this speech from 2000, seven years before his death, affirms.
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.
This week’s text is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Cider Booth.”
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on dead languages. Incidentally, the short reading in this half-page document speaks specifically of Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. As a matter of routine in my classroom, I taught Greek and Latin word roots for vocabulary building. When one thinks about how often classical word roots turn up in English words, the idea under the circumstances that these languages are “dead” can make for interesting classroom discussions. Also, when one considers that Spanish, the first lingua franca of a wide swath of student I served over the years, is in some respect a modern version of Latin, the idea that the tongue of the Roman Empire is dead doesn’t quite make sense.
Anyway, to conduct your investigation into the case of “The Cider Booth,” you will need this PDF of the illustration and questions that both drive the investigation and serve as evidence in it. Finally, to identify a suspect and bring him or her to the bar of justice, here is the typescript of the answer key you will need.
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, moving along on this cool, rainy morning in Southwestern Vermont, here is a learning support on hyphenation. Like several others I have posted here recently, this text comes from Paul Brians’ book, which, amazingly, he has made available at no cost on the Washington State University website, Common Errors in English Usage.
As Professor Brians points out, for a full exposition on the rules for hyphenation in English prose one really must consult The Chicago Manual of Style or something like it. This document does supply as much about hyphenation as the high-school, and perhaps even the college, writer needs to know.
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 the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in 1804. It is a key event in the early history of the United States; this half-page worksheet, with three questions, serves only as the briefest introduction to the event itself.
If you know only a little bit about this event, as I do, you know enough to understand that there is a professionally, politically and socially fraught backstory to it. Burr and Hamilton had been antagonizing each other for years, and the duel was in many respects the logical culmination of this conflict. I would think this affair would provide just the right kind of interesting challenge to an engaged and enterprising high school student preparing a research paper to satisfy requirements in the advanced grades.
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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