Category Archives: Independent Practice

Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root vor, which means to eat. You’ll find this productive root, unsurprisingly, at the base of words like carnivore, herbivore, and insectivore and voracious (all included in this document) as well as omnivore, not included here but a nice example of a pair of Latin roots–omni means all–combining to give us a useful word–someone or something that eats everything.

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.

Moving right along on a cool and cloudy Thursday morning in Brooklyn, here is a worksheet on the Greek word roots prot– and proto. It means primitive and first, which helps me understand how we end up, in English, with prototype. Protagonist, however, mystifies me a bit; I suppose because the protagonist is the primary (i.e. first) actor in a situation, the word sensibly springs from prot.

Anyway, this document includes several other words that spring from this productive root, including such scientific words as protoplast, protozoan, proton, and protozoology.

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.

OK, if you can use it, here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots vers and vert. They mean turn. So you probably won’t be surprised to hear that these roots turn up in commonly used English words such as adverse, divert, extrovert, and revert, since all involve a turning of some sort. I think a nifty assessment for this worksheet would be to ask students if they can think of any words that spring from this root–e.g. reverse, obverse, subvert, etc–that are not included in the 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.