Category Archives: The Weekly Text

The Weekly Text is a primary feature at Mark’s Text Terminal. This category will include a variety of classroom materials in English Language Arts and social studies, most often in the form of complete lesson plans (see above) in those domains. The Weekly Text is posted on Fridays.

The Weekly Text, March 13, 2020, Women’s History Month 2020, Week II: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Toni Morrison

For Week II of Women’s History Month 2020, here is a reading on Toni Morrison with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.

A Lesson Plan on War, Revolution, and Peace

Here is a lesson plan on war, revolution, and peace as causes of history. I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun agriculture. This is a discussion, brainstorming, and writing lesson, so here is a structured brainstorming and note-taking blank to use in the execution of this lesson.

And yes, for those in the know, I did crib the title of this lesson from the Hampshire College course (taught by Michael Klare when I took it in the fall of 1991) of the same name, part of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at that fine institution.

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.

The Weekly Text, March 5, 2020, Women’s History Month Week I: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Helen Hunt Jackson

For the first Friday of Women’s History Month 2020, here is a reading on indigenous rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Her work, which resulted in the disastrously inappropriate Dawes Severalty Act, was nonetheless the first real real attempt–via her book A Century of Dishonor–to bring this country to a reckoning with its genocidal policies against the original inhabitants of this continent.

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.

The Weekly Text, February 28, 2020, Black History Month 2020 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Shaka Zulu

OK, here, for the final Friday of Black History Month 2020, is a reading on Shaka Zulu and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.

The Weekly Text, February 21, 2020, Black History Month 2020 Week III: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Muddy Waters

For the end of Week III of Black History Month 2020, here is a short reading on the late, great Muddy Waters along with the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it.

[Addendum: first, here is a very cool image of Muddy Waters by the great illustrator Drew Friedman; if it weren’t sold out, I would definitely buy it–I’ve already collected a few of Mr. Friedman’s prints. Second, here is Muddy Waters’ appearance at the farewell concert of The Band in 1976, “The Last Waltz.”]

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.

The Weekly Text, February 14, 2020, Black History Month Week II: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Oprah Winfrey

At the end of Week II of Black History Month 2020, here is a short reading on Oprah Winfrey along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.

The Weekly Text, February 7, 2020, Black History Month 2020 Week I: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Alex Haley

OK, for week one of Black History Month 2020, here is a reading on Alex Haley along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.

The Weekly Text, January 31, 2019: A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “Windy Beach”

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Windy Beach.”

I begin this unit with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the American idiom “High Horse”–as in “Get off your high horse.” This scan of the illustration and questions about the case is really the center of the lesson. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key to solve the case.

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.

The Weekly Text, January 24, 2019: A Trove of Documents for Teaching Lord of the Flies

On January 6, I published 56 documents for teaching Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart.  In last week’s Text, I published a similar set of documents for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Night.

This week’s Text is a batch of documents for teaching William Golding’s Lord of the FliesI wrote these materials, but never marshalled them into a coherent unit plan, over a two-year period beginning a little over 12 years ago; after that, I never used them again, so it has been about ten years since I laid eyes on this stuff. In any case, let’s get these documents uploaded into this post.

Because I was working in global studies and United States history classrooms at the the same time that I was co-teaching the English class dealing with this novel, I perceived instantly that Golding’s novel was Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature” nightmare, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” For that reason, I asked the English teacher with whom I was teaching to make an explicit connection between Hobbes and Lord of the Flies. To that end, here is a reading on Hobbes and its (extended, you’ll notice, if you’ve previously picked up these things from Mark’s Text Terminal) accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I also wrote, to follow up on students’ understanding of the Hobbesian dystopia depicted in Lord of the Flies, this independent practice worksheet that I suspect I would have assigned at about the middle of the novel. The reading and worksheet above began the unit, I’m quite sure.

Next, here are 12 context clues worksheets–one for each chapter. I’m not sure why I compiled this complete vocabulary list for the novel, let alone kept it around. Perhaps I intended them as a learning support? I just don’t remember. I have learned the hard way not to throw away work, no matter how pointless or useless it appears at second glance, so that explains that document’s presence here.

These 12 comprehension worksheets drive a basic understanding of Lord of the Flies and its allegory.

Finally, here are three quizzes on the novel. You will note that these are numbered 2, 3, and 4. If there was ever a number 1, it is lost to time. Also, these aren’t exactly some of my best work, and may well reflect my contempt for my co-teacher’s (and the administrator under whom we served) insistence on quizzes as an assessment tool. I vastly prefer expository writing–i.e. papers–as a means of assessing understanding.

And that’s it. Every document in this post is in Microsoft Word, so these are documents you can manipulate for your own–and your students’–needs.

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.

The Weekly Text, January 17, 2020: A Trove of Documents for Teaching Night by Elie Wiesel

Mark’s Text Terminal is undergoing a cleaning of its digital storage locker. A couple of weeks ago I posted a trove of materials for teaching Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart; two weeks hence, I’ll post another cache of documents for teaching William Golding’s Hobbesian nightmare, Lord of the Flies.

This week’s Text is an assortment of documents I wrote between ten and twelve years ago for teaching Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night. I’ve not used these materials in ten years, so I am moving them off my hard drive and onto Mark’s Text Terminal for storage–and to offer them to others for their use.

I’ll start by uploading this reading on Night (from the Intellectual Devotional series) and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ve definitely posted these documents elsewhere on this website; since they are in this unit’s folder, I’ll include them here because it makes sense to do so.

As I write this post, I realize that when I walked into a new job at the High School of Economics & Finance in Lower Manhattan in the fall of 2008 (exciting times at that moment in the Financial District, as the world economy was about to fall off a cliff on account of worthless mortgage securities peddled fraudulently–and you who did this know who you are), I came into a situation in which my co-teacher, whom I’d not met, was out, and I needed to get some materials together right away to keep busy those young people whose education I was charged with delivering. For that reason, my first move was to write this prelude for group work to furnish kids with some context for understanding the Holocaust, and therefore for understanding Night.

Somewhere in this process I wrote this unit plan, which looks incomplete to me. I also wrote these eight lesson plans, only the first three of which, I regret, are complete. Still, the other five are solid templates, and wouldn’t be hard to finish.

Here are eight context clues worksheets, one for each chapter of Night, along with their eight sets of definitions for your class linguist.

Finally, here are the eight comprehension worksheets I used to guide the reading of the book.

Every document attached to this post is in Microsoft Word, so they are at the disposal of you and your students.

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.