This week’s Text is four parsing sentences worksheet for nouns. These are pretty simple literacy exercises designed to get students reading and understanding the structure of basic declarative sentences by analyzing the parts of speech in 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.
This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the Latin word root ver–it means true. You know, it turns up in words like veracity, verify, and verdict. This do-now exercise on the noun integrity serves well to open the lesson and hint at the meaning of the word root. Finally, this word root worksheet is the mainstay of the lesson.
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.
Apropos of that founding, this week’s Text is a reading on the Treaty of Versailles along with the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. This is, I would think, a staple of global studies classes.
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.
This week’s Text is four context clues worksheets to teach a family of words related to the noun constitution. I use the indefinite article to modify family because all of these words–I’ve included four here, constituent, two uses of constitute as a verb, and constitution–are polysemous and their use can become relatively complicated. Daniel Willingham, in the latest of his books I’ve read (to wit, The Reading Mind), has observed that really to build vocabulary, it is almost certainly best to teach a word across the range of its morphology and usage. These four worksheets are a start in that direction, but they could easily be elaborated on and, arguably improved.
In any case, the four words presented in these worksheets, in order, are as follows (definitions come from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition: constituent defined in the sense of “one who authorizes another to act as agent;’ constitute in the first sense (i.e. in Worksheet 1) used as a verb as in “set up, establish: as a: enact b: found c (1): to give due or lawful form to (2): to legally process;” constitute in the second sense (i.e. in Worksheet 2) use as a verb as in “make up, form, compose;” and, finally, constitution used as a noun as in “a: the basic principles and laws of a nation, state, or social group that determine the powers and duties of the government and guarantee certain rights to the people in it; b: a written instrument embodying the rules of a political or social organization.”
And that is it for this week. I hope you are enjoying the summer.
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.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan, one of many, that I worked up to use with Lawrence Treat’s series of kid’s books, Crime and Puzzlement. I came across these materials in two books last year, to wit George Hillocks Jr.’s otherwise unremarkable Teaching Argument Writing Grades 6-12: Supporting Claims with Relevant Evidence and Clear Reasoning (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2017), but also in two separate papers contained in Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison’s (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). All three of these texts extolled the Crime and Puzzlement books as exemplary instructional material for teaching students to assess, analyze, and synthesize evidence in support of an argument and contention.
I ordered the first volume, broke it up and scanned texts for several of the “cases,” and tried them out in my classroom. My freshman English students jumped right into these, and clearly enjoyed them. So I knew I had to build a unit to rationalize the use of this material in my classroom.
Now, about four months later, that unit is nearing completion, and I have 72 lessons in the unit. This week’s Text offers you the first lesson plan in the Crime and Puzzlement Unit Plan. To teach this lesson, you’ll need this worksheet on the case entitled Boudoir. To “solve” the “case,” you’ll need the answer key. Depending on how you begin your class period and its duration, you may want to start the lesson with a do-now exercise, which for this lesson is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Marie Antoinette’s probably apocryphal statement “Let them eat cake.”
Unfortunately, the Crime and Puzzlement books (there are three in total) appear to remain in copyright, so I don’t think I can ethically or legally post many of these lesson plans. If you choose to contrive your own material based on these books, I can post the unit plan (it’s not quite ready as of this writing) for you; it will contain the standards met, a lengthy, discursive justification for using these methods and materials, and other supporting documentation.
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.
Here are five worksheets on the homophones two, too, and to, which I am confident you have noticed that are frequently confused–sometimes to hilarious effect (i.e. Dumb and Dumber To), but more often just, well, confusing effect.
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 Friday again: this week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the Latin word root agri. It means, crop, production, and field. I begin this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun farmer. And, last, this worksheet on the Latin root agri is the mainstay of this lesson. Nota bene, please, that I have previously posted this worksheet by itself without a lesson plan or accompanying short exercise.
That’s it. I don’t know about where you are, but it has been very hot here. If you live or work in New York City and environs, I hope you’re staying cool.
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.
This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the using the interrogative pronoun. I start this lesson with this homophone worksheet on the contraction you’re and the possessive pronoun your. If for some reason (and there are often plenty of reasons for this) the lesson goes into a second day, I like to keep nearby this Cultural Literacy worksheet on plagiarism, which I use with other lessons as well (I find one cannot emphasize the issue of plagiarism enough). The center of this lesson this scaffolded worksheet on using the interrogative pronoun. 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.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan on postulating theses, i.e developing thesis statements, I wrote for somewhat more advanced students in our Wednesday afternoon institute class. Here is the worksheet that attends the lesson and the teacher’s copy of the worksheet. I wrote this last fall, and used it once; if ever you felt inclined to comment on Mark’s Text Terminal, I would enthusiastically welcome your comments on these documents. The unit of which they are a part is still in the developmental stage.
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.
Today’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using adverbs to modify adverbs. I start this lesson with this short exercise on the idiom “money burning a hole in one’s pocket.” Should this lesson go into a second day, here is a second short exercise, this one a on the homophones pore, poor, and pour. The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using adverbs to modify adverbs. Depending on the students you’re serving, they may need this learning support, which is a word bank to use with the cloze exercises on the worksheet. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy-answer key 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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