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, December 14, 2018: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Comics Legend Stan Lee

Posted on December 14, 2018 | Leave a comment

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I took a new job a couple of months ago; I’m now five weeks in, and so far so good. I’m spread much less thin, and working on literacy issues with much greater focus.

Which has permitted me the time, and the clarity of students who know their interests, to develop some new material, including this reading on comics legend Stan Lee and the comprehension worksheet to accompany it which students requested in an interest survey. You will note, particularly if you’ve heretofore downloaded and used other readings and comprehension worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, that these two documents are quite a bit longer than is the norm here. I find that bears what I hope is a brief explanation.

First of all, I synthesized this article from Wikipedia’s page on Stan Lee. While I do understand educators’ concerns with Wikipedia, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great idea to write off the site completely. I use Wikipedia heavily, support it financially, and believe it a worthy resource for certain types of work and fact-finding. In any case, where Wikipedia suffers what I’ll charitably call epistemological problems, I find them limited to politics, especially contemporary politics, and hot-button controversies. An article on someone like Stan Lee, in my experience, is highly unlikely to have been tampered with, and therefore unlikely to contain untruths.

Second, as to length. After trying to keep this reading to one page, I decided to edit together a relatively comprehensive biography of Lee. Thus it ran to two pages, and the comprehension worksheet to five. It goes without saying, I assume, that this document, as are all documents on this website, is in Microsoft Word format. Therefore, you may edit both documents to suit your students’ and your needs. I know this may be too much for some readers; simply cut sections you think are superfluous, and voila! You have differentiated instruction for one or more 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.

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The Weekly Text, December 7, 2018: A Set of Worksheets on the Greek Word Roots Hyper, Hyp, and Hypo

Posted on December 7, 2018 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text is a worksheet on the Greek root hyper and another on the Greek roots hyp and hypo. You will perceive phonetically that these roots are two sides of a coin, and indeed they are: hyper means above, excessive, beyond, and over; conversely, hypo means under, below, and less. If you’ve dealt with thyroid issues in your life, you surely know what these roots mean. So aspiring health care professionals, nota bene!

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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The Weekly Text, November 30, 2018: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on the Stock Market Crash of 1929

Posted on November 30, 2018 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text is a reading on the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. This is an important moment in global and United States history. The reading opens a number of conceptual questions about capital and investment, fiscal policy, fiscal irresponsibility, and the wages and price of capitalism–and those element of this ideology the New Dealer Thurman Arnold called “The Folklore of Capitalism.”

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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Posted in Essays/Readings, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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The Weekly Text, November 20, 2018: Five Worksheets on Using the Homophones Prophet and Profit

Posted on November 20, 2018 | Leave a comment

As I head into the long holiday weekend, let me offer these five homophone worksheets on the nouns prophet and profit, which also use profit as an intransitive verb; the verb can also be used transitively in the sense of “to be of service to.”

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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The Weekly Text, November 16, 2018: A Lesson Plan on Argumentation

Posted on November 16, 2018 | Leave a comment

It’s a snow day in Springfield: I salute the administration at the city level for its good sense. Snow days in New York were rare indeed. I recall with some bitterness, actually, making my way to and from the North Bronx to Lower Manhattan in some pretty messy, aggressive storms.

Several years ago, after reading Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s book They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2010), I got stuck on the idea of teaching argumentation at the high school level. Accordingly, I worked up this unit plan for teaching argumentation. Unfortunately, in this school in which I was serving there was no meaningful support for this kind of work. So this unit, by my standards, is still in its preliminary stages of development. Still, the basic outlines are there for teaching the material Mr. Graff and Ms. Birkenstein so ably present in their book. Indeed, I’ve already posted a lesson from this unit on Mark’s Text Terminal.

This week’s Text is the fourth lesson plan from this unit argumentation (you can find the other three by searching Mark’s Text Terminal for “argumentation”). Like the other three I’ve published, the work for this lesson is further practice on using rhetorical forms to frame arguments. I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the Latin phrase exempli gratia, which, as you probably know, means “for example” and turns up most commonly in English prose as the abbreviation e.g. Finally, here is the worksheet for trying out various rhetorical figures in arguments.

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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The Weekly Text, November 9, 2018: A Literacy Lesson on the Polysemous Word Bond

Posted on November 9, 2018 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text (after missing last week) is something I whipped up pretty much on the fly about three years ago when I was assigned an eight-meeting class conducted over eight weeks on math and science literacy. This literacy lesson on the polysemous word bond is, as I look at it now, an odd melange of stuff. Depending on what it is you want kids to understand, there are materials here for one extended lesson–I wrote this for a sixty-one-minute long period–or a couple of different short exercises.

The first document, because I worked in economics and finance-themed high school, is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on bond as a financial instrument. These two context clues worksheets on the verb and noun bond in the sense of attaching or joining follow; logically, I guess, this short reading and comprehension exercise on chemical bonds rounds out this deck. I also, for some reason, made up this learning support with three definitions of bond from Merriam-Webster’s 11th Edition.

Now that I think about it, Bronx County summoned me to jury duty before I had a chance to use this material. The coverage teacher who used it did say students received it relatively 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.

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The Weekly Text, October 27, 2018: Five Worksheets on Using the Homophones Rein, Rain, and Reign

Posted on October 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

As Mark’s Text Terminal prepares its move away from New York City, things have gotten a bit hectic around the warehouse. More news on this will follow (not that it’s especially interesting).

In the meantime, this week’s Text is five worksheets on the homophones rein, rain, and reign.

Over the years, I have noticed students struggling with the intransitive verb reign. This verb, which doesn’t morph at all in its transition to a noun, comes from the Latin regnum, which means kingdom. Keen observers will detect regnum as the basis of all kinds of words relating to ruling, not the least of which is regent. At the root of these words is the Latin reg, which means rule. This root shows up all around the Romance languages, and it shouldn’t be hard for native Spanish speakers–I work with many and pull this parlor trick all the time with them–to recognize their word Rey in this, i.e. king. Long story short? This little Latin root–reg–is at the core of a startling number of words across the Romance languages and English and can therefore be used profitably at some length for building vocabulary and developing understanding of the concepts the words represent.

Homophone worksheets as I conceive them are simply a slightly different approach to vocabulary building that a simple context clues worksheet with a focus on a single word. Also, it seems to me that kids in high school ought to know the use of the word rein, particularly as a transitive 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.

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The Weekly Text, October 19, 2018: A Lesson Plan on Commonly Used Prepositions

Posted on October 19, 2018 | Leave a comment

Things have been very hectic at Mark’s Text Terminal lately as I prepare to move this entire operation to Massachusetts. Still, the Weekly Text is a mainstay here; even during this transition, I will at the very least post something every Friday.

For this week’s Text, I offer a complete lesson plan on commonly used prepositions. This is from the sixth of my units on the parts of speech; by this time, students have become relatively proficient users of language, so I begin increasingly using, as the do-now exercises with which I begin lessons, Everyday Edit worksheets, which the good people at Education World give away on their site. For this lesson I use this Everyday Edit on Anne Sullivan, the extraordinary pedagogue who educated Helen Keller. If this lesson goes into a second day, here is another Everyday Edit on James Forten, Free Black Man.

The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on commonly used prepositions. The worksheet requires for its completion this learning support on commonly used prepositions. 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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The Weekly Text, October 12, 2018, Hispanic Heritage Month 2018 Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Tupac Amaru II

Posted on October 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

Today is the final Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month 2018. This week’s Text is this reading on the Inca rebel Tupac Amaru II and the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. If you recognize this anti-colonialist hero’s name, it’s very likely because the late rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur was named for him.

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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The Weekly Text, October 5, 2018, Hispanic Heritage Month 2018 Week III: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Pablo Neruda

Posted on October 5, 2018 | Leave a comment

Here, on the penultimate Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month 2018, here is a reading on Pablo Neruda. You can use that text any number of ways, I would think, but in any case here is the accompanying 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.

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