Category Archives: Independent Practice

This is material either specifically designed for or appropriate to use for what is more commonly known as “homework.”

Everyday Edit: Hank Aaron

Here is an Everyday Edit worksheet on Hank Aaron. If you and your students like this worksheet, the generous proprietors of Education World, who give away a year’s supply of them at their website.

If you find typos on this worksheet, that’s the point of the work. Ask students to proofread for errors, and then repair them.

Independent Practice: Songhai Empire

OK, folks tomorrow begins Black History Month 2020. Circumstances impel me, as they do every February, to editorialize briefly in saying that if Americans are honest with themselves about the history of the United States, then every month is Black History Month. That said, I am distinctly uncomfortable second-guessing the founders of Black History Month, particularly Dr. Carter G. Woodson.

So, let’s start the month off with this independent practice worksheet on the Songhai Empire.

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.

The Weekly Text, January 31, 2019: A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “Windy Beach”

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Windy Beach.”

I begin this unit with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the American idiom “High Horse”–as in “Get off your high horse.” This scan of the illustration and questions about the case is really the center of the lesson. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key to solve the case.

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.

A Worksheet on Forming Decimals from Prose

OK, here is the flip side of the coin for the post two below this one, to wit, a worksheet on forming decimals from prose. If you want it, here is 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.

A Worksheet on Writing Decimal Numbers as Prose

I’m teaching math, among other things, to middle-schoolers these days. Here is a worksheet on writing out decimals as prose expressions. If you can use it (it relieves my pea brain to have one of these handy when working with this material), here also is the answer key to that document.

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.

Word Root Exercise: Cephal/o, Encelphal/o

OK, wrapping up on a Wednesday afternoon, here is a worksheet on the Greek roots cephal/o and encephal/o. They mean, respectively, head and brain. Now you know, instinctively, that encephalitis is a disease of the head or brain.

As I’ve now said ad nauseum, if you have students interested in a career in healthcare, this is a word root that will quickly build their professional lexicon.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Tabula Rasa

On a chilly Wednesday morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on tabula rasa, which is an educational and epistemological concept from John Locke.

So I must ask: do students arrive in our classrooms as blank slates, as Locke claimed, or do they have basic cognitive frameworks for understanding the world? I imagine that entire academic careers may still depend on the discourses this question raises.

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.

Alexander Hamilton

OK, before I take my much-deserved leave of this institution this afternoon, here is a reading on Alexander Hamilton with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The musical Hamilton, also produced as a film, might make this high-interest material.

Just sayin’.

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.

Times New Roman or Comic Sans?

If you follow this blog regularly, you are likely aware of my obsession with handwriting. That mania extends to typefaces as well, and I have read, over the years, that the much-hated Comic Sans makes reading easy for students who struggle with the written word. I’ve always meant to test this. This morning, offhandedly, I performed that test with this short questionnaire on font styles.

To my surprise, most of my students told me they prefer Times New Roman. So, in the final analysis, I don’t know what to think.

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.

The Weekly Text, January 24, 2019: A Trove of Documents for Teaching Lord of the Flies

On January 6, I published 56 documents for teaching Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart.  In last week’s Text, I published a similar set of documents for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Night.

This week’s Text is a batch of documents for teaching William Golding’s Lord of the FliesI wrote these materials, but never marshalled them into a coherent unit plan, over a two-year period beginning a little over 12 years ago; after that, I never used them again, so it has been about ten years since I laid eyes on this stuff. In any case, let’s get these documents uploaded into this post.

Because I was working in global studies and United States history classrooms at the the same time that I was co-teaching the English class dealing with this novel, I perceived instantly that Golding’s novel was Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature” nightmare, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For that reason, I asked the English teacher with whom I was teaching to make an explicit connection between Hobbes and Lord of the Flies. To that end, here is a reading on Hobbes and its (extended, you’ll notice, if you’ve previously picked up these things from Mark’s Text Terminal) accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I also wrote, to follow up on students’ understanding of the Hobbesian dystopia depicted in Lord of the Flies, this independent practice worksheet that I suspect I would have assigned at about the middle of the novel. The reading and worksheet above began the unit, I’m quite sure.

Next, here are 12 context clues worksheets–one for each chapter. I’m not sure why I compiled this complete vocabulary list for the novel, let alone kept it around. Perhaps I intended them as a learning support? I just don’t remember. I have learned the hard way not to throw away work, no matter how pointless or useless it appears at second glance, so that explains that document’s presence here.

These 12 comprehension worksheets drive a basic understanding of Lord of the Flies and its allegory.

Finally, here are three quizzes on the novel. You will note that these are numbered 2, 3, and 4. If there was ever a number 1, it is lost to time. Also, these aren’t exactly some of my best work, and may well reflect my contempt for my co-teacher’s (and the administrator under whom we served) insistence on quizzes as an assessment tool. I vastly prefer expository writing–i.e. papers–as a means of assessing understanding.

And that’s it. Every document in this post is in Microsoft Word, so these are documents you can manipulate for your own–and your students’–needs.

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.