Category Archives: Independent Practice

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

The Weekly Text, August 25, 2017: A Lesson Plan on Using Prepositions with Pronouns in the Objective Case

Last spring, while teaching my unit on prepositions, I found I needed to revise and strengthen this lesson plan on using prepositions with pronouns in the objective case; as long as I had it out, I duplicated and set it aside for a future text, and that future has arrived, so here it is as a Weekly Text.

To teach this lesson you’ll need the two do-now exercises (and, as I’ve written here before, if you like Everyday Edits, the good people at Education World generously give them away), the first of which is an Everyday Edit on Charles Drew; the second, another Everyday Edit, this one on the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, you may need if classroom exigencies extend this lesson into a second day. The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using prepositions with the objective case of pronouns. Your students and you will probably find useful this learning support to accompany the worksheet.

I design my worksheets, as you’ll see explained in the About Weekly Texts on the home page banner, so that I can insert students’ names in them as both subject and object noun. This worksheet is, in terms of these insertions, complicated sufficiently that I’ve decided to include in this post this finished copy, ready for classroom use, of the worksheet to demonstrate how to fill the asterisks with subject and object nouns in the worksheet itself. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet which serves as the answer key as well.

That’s it. I hope this lesson is useful to you, and not marred by its prolixity.

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 Super Multiplication Table

As a child, I enjoyed math in school and did fairly well at it. I liked the symmetry and order of numbers, and found multiplication a particularly scintillating procedure (and yes, I am serious; I was a weird kid). By the time I crossed the Rubicon from fractions and decimals into algebra, I could already see I was in trouble. For some reason, I could never get right orders of operations and other algebraic procedures. For some reason I felt, and continue to feel, ashamed of this intellectual inadequacy.

Of course, I am tempted to blame my math teachers in middle school, who were indeed dismal; both of my eighth grade math teachers clearly hated kids. Since I was getting more than enough of that sentiment elsewhere in my life at the time, I avoided them. So I suppose I am at fault as well.

Unsurprisingly, I have been and remain a terrible math teacher. I’ve developed some literacy lessons on both math and science, but they are more reading comprehension work than actual cognitive work in the domains themselves. That said, I have become interested (to some extent for obvious personal reasons) in helping struggling students improve their own understanding of the math curriculum they are expected to master. To that end, I’ve proposed to a colleague in the mathematics department at my school that we collaborate on developing some math learning supports for our struggling students.

This morning I wrote this super multiplication table as a start on this endeavor. I know this doesn’t necessarily augur great sophistication in this project; it’s worth considering, however, how many students who struggle with math do so because they never learned their multiplication tables. As with all of the material posted on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document that you can chop and repurpose as many times as your circumstances require. Indeed, you may end up with as many versions of this as you have students.

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, August 3, 2017: Two Context Clues Worksheets on Descend (vi/vt) and Descendant (n)

Here are two context clues worksheets on the verb descend and the noun descendant. As you will infer from the choice of the noun, these are the definitions of these words that relate to origins rather than moving in a downward direction. I like to use these early in the year in global studies classes.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Schism

On a bright, cool morning in Springfield, Vermont, I offer you this Cultural Literacy worksheet on schism. The definition and this worksheet limits the noun to its meaning as a breach within a religion. Merriam-Webster defines it more broadly, so there is some room here for the kind of rich discussion on usage that educational research suggests benefits students.

In any case, by their senior year at the very least, this is a word and concept high school students really ought 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.

A Midsummer Text: Five Worksheets on Differentiating the Homophones Who’s and Whose

I’ve been working on a series of new homophone worksheets, including these five on the who’s and whose and this learning support to accompany them.

I assume you see these words confused regularly, as they are two of the most commonly confused homophones in the English language. Writing these worksheets, I’m afraid I let the material get away from me. Endeavoring to create materials that helped students form their own, comprehensive, understanding of these two words, I wrote a lot of text that I realized, after it was down on paper, was too much information for worksheet instructions. I turned quite a bit of the text into the learning support post in this Text. However, the worksheets themselves still may be prolix by virtue of the still-lengthy definitions of these two words and their definitions,

In any case, these are Word documents, so you may manipulate them for your use.

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.

The Weekly Text, July 21, 2017: A Lesson Plan on Using the Degrees of Adjectives

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using the degrees of adjectives. To refresh your memory, the three degrees of adjectives are the positive (big), the comparative (bigger) and the superlative, (biggest). Two do-now exercises open this unit, the first a parsing sentences worksheet on verbs and the second a Cultural Literacy Worksheet on acronyms. (I include as a matter of course two do-now exercises in the event that a lesson runs into a second day because of interruptions.) The mainstay of the lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using the three degrees of adjectives. You may also want to use this learning support on the degrees of adjectives. Finally, you might find the teacher’s copy of the worksheet useful while giving this lesson.

Finally, this lesson affords you an opportunity, should you care to emphasize it, to point out to students that they will always, after the comparative adjective, use the conjunction than and not the adverb then.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Dyslexia

Here is a short Cultural Literacy exercise on dyslexia to complement some other readings and worksheets posted below on cognition and learning.

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.

A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Understanding Memory

To add a third to the two Intellectual Devotional Readings on oppositional defiant disorder and learning I posted below, here is an Intellectual Devotional reading on memory and a reading comprehension worksheet to complement 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.

A Short Exercise on the Greek Word Root Crani/o

Here is a short worksheet on the Greek word root crani/o. Your students will very likely recognize quickly that it means skull and cranium. Along the way, however, they’ll expand their vocabulary with some common medical terms–particularly helpful if they are interested in careers in healthcare.

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: Right of Privacy

Now seems like a perfect time to post a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the right of privacy. Did we retain this right, or did it vanish with social media and other digital platforms (like the very blog you’re reading now!).

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.