Category Archives: Worksheets

Classroom documents for student use. Most are structured and scaffolded, and most are pitched at a fundamental level in terms of the questions they ask and the work and understandings they require of students.

Robotic Surgery

Posted on July 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on robotic surgery along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is an Intellectual Devotional reading, so the worksheet is a two-pager with the standard (for Mark’s Text Terminal) eight vocabulary words, eight comprehension questions, and three “Additional Facts” questions.

If memory serves, I wrote this for a colleague who was running an after-school robotics program at a school in which I served in the North Bronx. I’m fairly certain I’ve never used it.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Worksheets

Tagged , , , ,

Cultural Literacy: Carbon

Posted on July 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on carbon. This is a half-page worksheet with three questions. In other words, the barest of introductions to the topic. I believe I wrote this to accompany a lesson on carbon dating for a co-taught freshman global studies class in New York City.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets

Tagged , , , ,

Litmus Test (n)

Posted on July 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun litmus test. It means, as we use in daily discourse, “a test in which a single factor (as an attitude, event, or fact) is decisive.”

As I prepare this post, it occurs to me that I may have never used this document in a class. I prepared it to have it ready–I think this is a noun phrase students ought to know, because of the commonness of its use in even conversational English. But it is also, in its literal sense, a term of art in the physical sciences as a pH indicator when testing materials for acidityterm.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Worksheets

Tagged , , , ,

Common Errors in English Usage: Us and We

Posted on July 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Last but not least today, here is a worksheet on differentiating us and we when writing sentences with these two first-person plural pronouns. As you can see, the work here involves, basically, understanding the difference between the nominative and objective cases when using personal pronouns. Like any of the documents that you find on this blog under the header Common Errors in English Usage, the supporting text for this worksheet is derived from Paul Brians’ book of the same name, which he has generously made available at no cost at the Washington State University website.

This worksheet contains Professor Brians’ text with ten modified cloze exercises to give students a chance to try their hand at using these pronouns. As always, or almost always, this document is formatted in Microsoft Word, so you can alter it to your class’s needs.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Worksheets

Tagged ,

Word Root Exercise: Port

Posted on July 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root port. It means “to carry.” Accordingly, you’ll find it at the base of frequently used English words like import, export, deport, and transport (which also contains the Latin root trans–across, through, change, beyond) and even comportment, which arises from the verb comport, “to behave in a manner conformable to what is right, proper, or expected.”

As we might put it more figuratively, comportment means how one carries oneself. As I recall, when I was in elementary school in the 1960s, my report card carried a section on comportment.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Worksheets

Tagged , , ,

Infallible (adj)

Posted on July 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective infallible. It comes from a solid Latin noun, fallibilis, and means, essentially, “incapable of error.”

Fat chance, but what do I know?

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Worksheets

Tagged , , ,

Thomas Jefferson

Posted on July 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Happy Belated July 4th! In observance of the holiday, here is a reading on Thomas Jefferson along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As most people understand, Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence of the British colonies in North America. A deeper dive into the origins of Jefferson’s rhetorical style in the Declaration shows that it is mostly a summary of issues John Locke raised in his Two Treatises of Government, particularly in the second.

Whenever I think of Jefferson, to be honest, a quote that has stuck with me from my high school reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s oeuvre. He is one of the great quotable authors of the twentieth century. This one comes from Breakfast of Champions (rather than, as I thought all these years, from  Wampeters, Foma, and Granfallooons, a book of Vonnegut’s essays and reviews that bears a rereading): “Thomas Jefferson High School…His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world’s greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.” Vonnegut never backed down from this observation, as this speech from 2000, seven years before his death, affirms.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets

Tagged , , , , ,

The Weekly Text, 2 July 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “The Cider Booth”

Posted on July 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s text is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Cider Booth.” 

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on dead languages. Incidentally, the short reading in this half-page document speaks specifically of Latin, ancient Greek, and Sanskrit. As a matter of routine in my classroom, I taught Greek and Latin word roots for vocabulary building. When one thinks about how often classical word roots turn up in English words, the idea under the circumstances that these languages are “dead” can make for interesting classroom discussions. Also, when one considers that Spanish, the first lingua franca of a wide swath of student I served over the years, is in some respect a modern version of Latin, the idea that the tongue of the Roman Empire is dead doesn’t quite make sense.

Anyway, to conduct your investigation into the case of “The Cider Booth,” you will need this PDF of the illustration and questions that both drive the investigation and serve as evidence in it. Finally, to identify a suspect and bring him or her to the bar of justice, here is the typescript of the answer key you will need.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

Tagged , , , , , ,

Cultural Literacy: The Burr-Hamilton Duel

Posted on July 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in 1804. It is a key event in the early history of the United States; this half-page worksheet, with three questions, serves only as the briefest introduction to the event itself.

If you know only a little bit about this event, as I do, you know enough to understand that there is a professionally, politically and socially fraught backstory to it. Burr and Hamilton had been antagonizing each other for years, and the duel was in many respects the logical culmination of this conflict. I would think this affair would provide just the right kind of interesting challenge to an engaged and enterprising high school student preparing a research paper to satisfy requirements in the advanced grades.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, Worksheets

Tagged , , ,

Fraud (n)

Posted on July 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun fraud. When I found this straggler in the warehouse, I wondered why I wouldn’t have composed a companion document on, at the very least, fraudulent, if not the transitive verb defraud.

As it happens, I did write one on the former, but not the latter. Given the state of society and culture, defraud is a word students ought to have in their vocabulary. So, if you’re interested, be on the lookout for one in these pages.

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.

Leave a comment

Posted in English Language Arts, Worksheets

Tagged , ,