Here are two context clues worksheets on the verb secede and the noun secession. I hope you find them useful.
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.
It’s a cool and pleasant Tuesday morning in New York City, a nice break from the brutal heat and humidity of the past week. Here, if you have any use for them, are three context clues worksheets on command as an adjective, a noun, and a verb.
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.
As with supply, it has taken me an inexplicably long time (given my current posting at the High School of Economics & Finance in Lower Manhattan) to create context clues for demand. So, here is a context clues worksheet on demand as a noun and another for demand as a verb to accompany the context clues worksheets below on supply as a noun and a verb.
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.
As I work mostly at outdoor pubs and cafes through the summer, I write longhand in a Moleskine notebook. I’ve ended up writing a lot of new context clues worksheets, mostly because they’re easy and quick to contrive. Considering that I work in an economics-and-finance-themed public high school, I don’t know why it has taken me so long to write a context clues worksheet for supply as a noun or another for supply used as a verb. But here they are now, for your use if you need them.
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 couple of months ago I posted a short piece on the the Intellectual Devotional series of books. I believe these books have great potential for use in middle and high school classrooms; I’ve used them repeatedly and successfully with struggling readers and learners in my own high school classroom, as well as handing them out for independent makeup to students who have fallen behind.
During the 2016-2017 school year I plan as part of my personal professional development to take a longer and more analytical look at these documents with an eye toward either incorporating some of them into existing unit plans, or developing new lessons or units around them. In the process of this endeavor, which to a limited extent is already underway, I’ll convert these readings from PDFs (I scanned them directly from the pages of the books) to Word documents. Once they are in a manipulable form I can edit and adjust them for students’ reading levels. It’s worth mentioning that the authors of these books, Noah Oppenheim and David S. Kidder, are excellent compilers and editors. If you find yourself editing their writing for your students, I strongly recommend conforming to their original outline in your edits. These are some of the most well-outlined readings I’ve ever seen.
When I posted my original exposition of the five Intellectual Devotional volumes, I wrote the authors in search of their permission to post an occasional article from their books. I never heard back. I’m going to stick my neck out, and for this week’s text here is an Intellectual Devotional reading on the Black Death in Word format, so you can edit it, change the typeface, or whatever else best suits the students you serve. In addition, here is a reading comprehension worksheet to accompany the Black Death reading above. Eventually, I’ll incorporate these two documents into a lesson on writing essays for high-stakes exams. I’ll very likely end up posting that here as well.
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.
While I was away in Vermont last month, I barely opened my computer and so skipped two Fridays, which is the day I have habitually posted my Weekly Texts. Ergo, another midweek Text to make up for those Fridays. First, here are two context clues worksheets on motive and motivation (both nouns) to help students understand these oft-used words in the English language. Then, because I work in a high school with an economics and finance theme, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the profit motive.
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.
“History n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
Ambrose Bierce
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Classes are over, Regents testing is finished, and the halls in this school are eerily quiet. I’m enjoying some long stretches of uninterrupted planning time. Focusing on developing some more Greek word root worksheets–for words that are more abstract and therefore a bit more difficult to work with for struggling students–I’ve developed a small group of them that can be used as do-now exercises at the beginning of a period. These types of tasks aid me in getting teenagers settled after that second bell rings, and therefore focused for the primary lesson of the day.
Word root worksheets, in my classroom, are meant to accomplish several things, but three are salient: the first is to allow students a chance to work with a dictionary, whether that’s in book form or an app on a smartphone (I encourage students to use whatever works best with their learning styles); second, word root exercises aid students in building their vocabularies quickly; third, word root work fosters pattern recognition, with which, in my experience, struggling students need all the help they can get.
Coincidentally, as I was preparing these worksheets, the National Association of Special Education Teachers posted this article on pattern recognition and language acquisition on Facebook. So I rolled “Theme from the Vindicators” by the Fleshtones, and kept at it.
This week’s Text comes from the fruits of my recent labors, to wit, two do-now exercises on the Greek word roots leuk/o and leuc/o, and nephr/o. Students simply read the definitions, then use the common words–the pattern, that is–to identify the meanings of the roots. For leuk/o and leuc/o. the meanings are white and colorless; for nephr/o, the meaning is kidney (which is why if you have kidney disease, you consult a nephrologist).
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.
We’re in the home stretch of the school year, and not a moment to soon: about three weeks ago, several students I work with began arriving with shell-shocked looks on their faces, and even further attenuation in their attention spans.
I understand. I feel how they look, as I regularly tell them.
This week’s Text is two context clues worksheets on two essential words, paternal and maternal. If you haven’t used these before, you might find the users’ manual for context clues worksheets useful. These complement a couple of word root worksheets I posted in March: the first one is on the Latin word roots patr, patri and pater, and the second on the Latin word roots mat, matri, and mater.
As always, if you find these worksheets useful, I would be much obliged to hear how–particularly if you modified them for your classroom.
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.
Several years ago, while I was engaged with my final go-around with the Book of the Month Club, I took a chance on a title that sounded interesting: The Intellectual Devotional Modern Culture. The book’s title is about as exact a description of its contents as I’ve ever seen. First, it contains daily devotionals, just like the religious books that serve as part of its namesake, for each of the 365 days of the year; second, each entry–which I should mention are stylishly written and cogently edited–addressed a topic in modern culture.
Reading its daily entries, it didn’t take me long to understand that these readings, particularly those on athletes and pop music stars, would serve well as reading work for the struggling and alienated learners in my classroom. I broke the spine of the book and began separating pages to scan into my computer and save for future use. At the same time, I started writing reading comprehension worksheets to accompany these readings.
Moreover, I soon discovered that the authors of my book, David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim had in fact published a series of five Intellectual Devotional books. It didn’t take me long to buy the rest of the series and begin developing curricular materials from them keyed to various topics in the high school course of study. At this point, I have several hundred readings and worksheets that I’ve developed from these excellent books.
I recently wrote the authors of these books to seek permission to post some of their readings on Mark’s Text Terminal–particularly those I have rendered in typescript, so that teachers who work with struggling readers might edit them for those students. I have yet to hear back from them, but hope springs eternal, I guess. The good news is that all five books remain in print in durable hardcover editions. You can order them from your preferred bookseller (which I hope is local and independent, if I may presume to say so).
From time to time, outside The Weekly Text, I’ll publish here my worksheets to accompany the readings in The Intellectual Devotional books. To that end, here’s a reading comprehension worksheet on Michelangelo from the book I call, for file-coding purposes, The Intellectual Devotional Basic, so called because it has no subtitle, and is simply called The Intellectual Devotional (the subtitles for the other four books are the aforementioned Modern Culture, as well as Health, Biographies, and American History).
As always, I hope you find this useful. If you do, I’d like to hear how these kinds of readings and worksheet work in your classroom, particularly if you adapt them for struggling or alienated learners.
Post Scriptum: Here is the reading that accompanies this worksheet on Michelangelo, which I posted at a user’s request in October of 2017.
Addendum: I’ve posted these in the About Posts & Texts page, but I want to put them here as well. As I mentioned, there are five volumes of The Intellectual Devotional series and I’ve prepared reading and worksheet templates in Microsoft Word (so you can alter them to your needs) for all five books. So, here are the templates: The first set is from the general book (which I have called, for my purposes of file management, “Basic”), simply titled The Intellectual Devotional. Here are templates for preparing materials from the American History volume. Next up is the set of four templates work with the Biographies volume. Here are the four templates for the Health volume. For the Modern Culture volume (the first of these I bought, incidentally, and a book full of high-interest material that I recognized had great potential for designing short reading and comprehension exercises for struggling learners, especially those with short attention spans), here are yet another four templates for readings and worksheets. Finally, here is the bibliography of all five titles for copying and pasting citations, or whatever else you might need it to do.
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