Category Archives: Social Sciences

Here is a worksheet on Tanzania. This is full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and seven comprehension questions.

The second sentence in the reading, I must warn users, is a slog. It is actually four clauses separated by semicolons. This sentence outlines the geography of Tanzania and its neighbors–the kind of thing I want to try to use with students who are a bit higher on the scaffold of literacy. If you are dealing with emergent readers or users of English as a second language, I think you will perceive the necessity of breaking up that second sentence, the verbal equivalent of the Green Monster at Fenway Park in Boston.

Fortunately, the task is relatively easy. You really only need to remove the semicolons and turn the clauses they separate into complete sentences and terminate them with periods. For example, the second clause, “to the east by the Indian ocean,” you can rewrite as “The eastern border of Tanzania is the Indian Ocean.”

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 this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Sierra Leone. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and three comprehension questions. As I prepared these for use, either in the classroom or on this blog, I intended to use them as measures of reading comprehension and mental organization. So there are a lot of questions along the lines of “What nation is to the north of Sierra Leone?” There are several such questions in this document which I hope will help teachers diagnose students’ reading struggles and formulate solutions.

In the case of most of these Cultural Literacy worksheets dealing with nation-states in Africa, the most important thing is to read one sentence at a time, then figure out which question it answers.

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.