Category Archives: Reference

These are materials for teachers and parents, and you’ll find, in this category, teachers copies and answer keys for worksheets, quotes related to domain-specific knowledge in English Language Arts and social studies, and quotes on issues of professional concern. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Term of Art: Declarative

Posted on April 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Declarative: Constituting a statement or assertion that may be either true or false, e.g., ‘Language must continually change.’”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Kismet

Posted on April 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Kismet: A musical play (1953) based on a play (1911) by Edward Knoblock about a poet turned beggar who has a series of adventures reminiscent of The Arabian Knights. The music of Alexander Borodin was arranged by Robert Wright and George Forrest. The title comes from the Turkish qismet (‘portion’ or ‘lot’) and is now commonly understood to mean ‘fate.’ Kismet is sometimes advanced as a more becoming alternative to ‘Kiss me” in Horatio Nelson’s putative last words, ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

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Term of Art: Auditory Perception

Posted on April 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

“auditory perception: The ability to process and make sense of information that is received as sound. Involving recognition and interpretation, rather than hearing itself, auditory perception is related to the ways in which the brain recognizes and discriminates sounds in order to make sense of them.

Problems with auditory perception are frequently associated with language disorders and may have significant effect on an individual’s language development in areas such as reading, expressive language, and receptive vocabulary. These problems are a major factor in language learning disabilities.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.

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5 Wizards in Lord of the Rings

Posted on April 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Saruman the White * Gandalf the Grey * Radagast the Brown * Alatar also named Morinehtar * Pallando also named Romestamo

The Five are known as Wizards by men, and as the Istari by Elves, and their role is to assist Middle-Earth. Saruman is the man of skills; Gandalf is the elf of the staff; the dreamer; Radagast is the friend of birds and tender of beasts; Alatar (also named Morinehtar) and Pallando (Romestamo) are the sky-blue wizards who journey into the east and out of the story.”

Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.

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A Lesson Plan on Using Linking Verbs

Posted on April 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

Here is a lesson plan on using linking verbs, which is the first part of two lessons on using these kinds of verbs with predicate adjectives. This is a very common syntactical structure in English, so I have a number of lessons, using a number of strategies and parts of speech, that aim to help students develop their own mastery over this kind of sentence.

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on intransitive verbs; in the event that the lesson goes into a second day, I keep this homophones worksheet on the adjectives hardy and hearty nearby. This learning support is a word bank of predicate adjectives to use with this scaffolded worksheet that is the center of the lesson. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.

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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Donald Woods Winnicott

Posted on April 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Donald Woods Winnicott: (1896-1971) A British pediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work on the mother-baby relationship directed attention to the infant’s environment and ‘good-enough mothering.’ Often discussed by modern feminist writers on parenting, his most accessible book is The Child, The Family, and the Outside World (1964).”

Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Stencil

Posted on April 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Stencil: A simple graphic arts process in which the design is cut into a thin, flexible material (such as cardboard) and the color is brushed through the openings onto paper, fabric, wall surfaces, etc. Silk screen is a stencil process. See POCHOIR.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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The Algonquin Wits: Harpo Marx Visits Alexander Woollcott’s Summer Place

Posted on April 20, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Harpo Marx once arrived at Woollcott’s Lake Bomoseen home in a broken-down Model-T Ford. ‘What do you call that?’ Woollcott exclaimed as he regarded the automobile.

‘This is my town car,’ Harpo explained.

‘What was the town?’ asked Woollcott. ‘Pompeii?’”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

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Term of Art: Correlative

Posted on April 20, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Correlative: Indicating combined or reciprocal function but not adjacency in the sentence, e.g., the conjunctions ‘not only’ and ‘but,’ ‘neither’ and ‘nor,’ the phrases ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other hand.’”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Term of Art: Verification

Posted on April 20, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Verification: In empiricist philosophy, knowledge-claims are accepted as scientific only if they are verifiable. To verify a statement is to provide evidence, generally of and empirical or observational kind, for believing it to be true. In logical empiricism the meaning of a statement was treated as equivalent to its method of verification, and only verifiable statements were accepted as meaningful. In non-empiricist philosophies of science, and in less extreme forms of empiricism, it is accepted that evidence may give good reasons for believing in the truth of a statement, whilst falling short in the sense of conclusive proof.”

Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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