Category Archives: Independent Practice

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

A Learning Support on Gerunds and Pronouns

Posted on July 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on gerunds and pronouns. This is about a half-page of text, so there is room (and the latitude, since, like just about everything on this blog, this is a Microsoft Word document you can manipulate for your particular use) to make a worksheet of this should you see fit.

Basically, the text here explains the proper use of possessive pronouns following gerunds. It’s both simple and complicated at once, but as Paul Brians explains (this is drawn from his book Common Errors in English Usage), the advice in the passage will improve the quality of student writing.

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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Cultural Literacy: Fine Arts

Posted on July 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of fine arts. This is a very short document: a one-sentence reading and two comprehension questions.

In other words, the barest of introductions to the idea of fine arts–but an introduction nonetheless.

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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Common Errors in English Usage: Ethics (n), Morale (n) and Moral (adj)

Posted on July 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a worksheet on using the nouns ethics and morale, and the adjective moral. As always, this worksheet, which consists of ten modified cloze exercises, comes from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage, available–amazingly–in its entirety on the Washington State University website.

These words, and the concepts they represent, I submit, are things kids should know, understand, and be able to apply both in specific and general discourse.

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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Third World

Posted on July 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on the Third World along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

For the record, I disdain this term, which smacks of colonialism and in fact, as far as I am concerned, is a legacy of colonialism. The colonial powers expropriated wealth and labor from their colonies, then saddled them with a moniker that makes it sound like poverty and underdevelopment is somehow their own fault. If this reading didn’t point out this term’s problems, however blandly (“In addition, some artists and intellectuals adopted the term Third World to describe the common history of imperialism and decolonization shared by many countries in the group” and “Though some now regard the term as insensitive, it remains in use to describe impoverished parts of the globe….”), I probably wouldn’t publish it at all. That said, the reading does open a door to a critical discussion of colonialism and its atrocious legacy.

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Folk Music

Posted on July 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on folk music. This is a half-page worksheet with a relatively short reading and three comprehension questions.

The reading implies, but does not spell out, the concept of folkways. I never understood, in my years teaching both English and social studies, why folkways as a concept was never taught explicitly, thereby offering students the opportunity to instantiate or reify it in their own lives; many of the students I served in New York City were of families recently immigrated to the United States. Understanding folkways, and using that understanding to distinguish between folkways and mores strikes me as a key element of any academic domain at the secondary level that calls itself “social studies.”

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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A Learning Support on Single Quotation Marks

Posted on July 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

OK, on a rainy Sunday morning, here is a learning support on using single quotation marks. This is another piece of text culled from Paul Brians’ fine usage guide, Common Errors in English Usage, which you’ll find in its entirety on the Washington State University website under that hyperlink. The textual passage is a single, short paragraph. So there is a wide field for turning this into a worksheet, should you want or need to do so; as is mostly the case on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document, so you can adapt it in any number of ways (including exporting it to another word processor) should you wish.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to be a stickler on this punctuation rule. In fact, it got me into trouble with a principal who didn’t understand the typographical rules and conventions for using double and single quotation marks; I l left an explanation of them, from a different style guide, in his mailbox after reading yet another of his cluttered, illegible memos. He didn’t appreciate it.

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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The Weekly Text, 16 July 2021: A Lesson Plan on Nations with the Longest Coastlines from The Order of Things

Posted on July 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on nations with the longest coastlines. You’ll need this reading with comprehension questions to teach this lesson. This is material for emerging reader, students with reading-related learning disorders, and English language learners.

This is a short and simple reading comprehension lesson with the usual twist on these lessons adapted from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s superb reference book, The Order of Things: students will deal with both numbers and words (often a challenging endeavor for some readers) in the reading in a relatively low-stakes environment. For more about these lessons, see the “About Posts & Texts” page, linked to below the masthead on this blog’s homepage.

That’s it for this week, Stay cool and stay safe,

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.

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Cultural Literacy: Catherine the Great

Posted on July 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Catherine the Great. To my surprise, this is the first material on the Empress I have published on this blog.

She is without question a world-historical figure, and probably of interest to a certain type of student, probably female. In any case, I’ll make a point of producing a couple of more posts about it.

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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Word Root Exercise: Blast/o

Posted on July 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a worksheet on the Greek word root blasto/o. It means “cell, cell layer, immature cell, and “primitive bud.”

As you will see when you read the words under review, this isn’t a root that produces a lot of high-frequency words in English. But these words, if the the book from which the text for this document is drawn can be trusted, these words do turn up on the SAT. And if you have students planning careers in the health care professions? This is definitely a word root they should 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.

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Zenger Trial

Posted on July 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on the Zenger Trial along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is a relatively short reading as selections from the Intellectual Devotional series go, but the worksheet conforms to this blog’s standard: eight vocabulary words to define, eight comprehension questions, and three “additional facts” questions.

This piece of litigation from colonial-era America was barely on my radar screen until it popped up as a question on the United States history College Level Examination (CLEP) test. To summarize even beyond the limits of this short reading, John Peter Zenger published a newspaper in New York City, The New York Weekly Journal. Zenger used his paper to criticize the colonial governor of New York, William Cosby. Cosby accused Zenger of libel and sedition and in November of  However, a grand jury refused to indict Zenger (which, if memory serves, indicated Cosby’s popularity). In 1735, Zenger was acquitted of the charges against him. His case, in American history, is often cited as the birth of the principle of free press in the United States.

In other words, in many respects, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution has its roots in the Zenger Affair.

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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