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.

Cultural Literacy: Fall of Rome

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the fall of Rome. This is half-page worksheet that offers the barest of introductions to the topic. Still, it is a good general introduction or a memory-jogger if your students need one.

It might make more interesting–even compelling–reading if one adds the context of, say, news footage of events at the United States capitol on January 6, 2021.

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.

Sober (adj), Sobriety (n)

Here are a pair of context clues worksheets on sober and sobriety, respectively an adjective and a noun.

In writing these, I sought to include both primary meanings of sober, i.e., where alcohol and intoxicants are concerned, “sparing in the use of food or drink,” “not addicted to intoxicating drink,” and “not drunk”; where an approach to life and its vagaries are concerned, “marked by sedate or gravely or earnestly thoughtful character or demeanor,” “marked by temperance, moderation, or seriousness,” and “showing no excessive or extreme qualities of fancy, emotion, or prejudice”

The noun sobriety simply means “the quality or state of being sober.” In the worksheet for this word, then, I also attempted to create prose that students could use to infer the above meanings of sober. As I prepared these for publication, I tried to remember why I wrote them, but couldn’t. So I don’t know if I intended to use them together in one sitting, or to use them discretely over a week’s time, and use sobriety to gauge understanding and retention of the previously used worksheet for sober.

In any case, they’re yours now if you want them, so you can use them as you will.

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.

Influenza Vaccine

Here is a reading on the influenza vaccination along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Over the years, I have heard various public figures opine on the need for a return to a solid civics curriculum in public schools in the United States. In fact, two United States Senators recently introduced legislation, called the Educating for Democracy Act, that would invest $1 billion the development of civics education in our country. In general and particularly in the light how closely our country has veered toward fascism in the past several years, I must concede the point. Apropo of civics education, I submit that learning about the science of vaccines, and vaccine efficacy, is at the moment an integral element of civics education–not to mention part of a general education.

So here you are. There are other materials on this site about vaccine–just search vaccine or vaccination.

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, April 23, 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Latin Word Root Mill-, Milli-

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the lesson plan on the Latin word root, which mean, respectively, thousand and thousandth. I open this lesson with this worksheet on the noun century.  Here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the primary work of this lesson.

As you can see, these are very productive roots in English, yielding words like millennium and millipede. As I look at this lesson plan, I see that I intended to write two separate worksheets for these two roots. There are two separate listings for these roots,  but I don’t find, in the dictionary that informs this work, a separate word list for milli. In any case, these documents are, as the bulk of the material posted here, in Microsoft Word. So, it you wanted to add millimeter to the list of words to analyze and define, you can.

In any case, depending on the students you serve, there is plenty of room in this lesson for a freewheeling discussion on mill and milli, whether it is important to know both, and why.

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.

Common Errors in English Usage: Pheasant (n), Peasant (n)

Here is an English usage worksheet on the nouns pheasant and peasant. I’m not sure if the former word is essential to the high school lexicon, but the latter certainly is. Any study of history will necessitate the use of the word peasant.

But these worksheets–there will eventually be a hundred or more of them on Mark’s Text Terminal–is primarily usage, not vocabulary building, though I think vocabulary building could be a corollary benefit. I wrote these to meet the Common Core standard (L.11-12.1b), to wit, “Resolve issues of complex or contested usage, consulting references, (e.g., Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English UsageGarner’s Modern American Usage) as needed.” I hope they are useful in that way.

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.

A Concluding Assessment Lesson on Adverbs

If you search “lesson plan on adverbs” on this blog, you will find that there are a total of seven lesson plans dealing with this part of speech; here is the concluding assessment for the unit those seven lessons comprise.

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Because this lesson all but inevitably runs into a second day, here is another Cultural Literacy worksheet, this one on the idiom “six of one, a half dozen of the other.” Finally, here is the structured worksheet, which closely follows the sequence of the aforementioned seven lessons, that is the primary work of this lesson and the concluding assessment of this seven-lesson unit.

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.

William Randolph Hearst

Here is a reading on William Randolph Hearst along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

If you have Netflix, the service’s recently released film Mank deals with William Randolph Hearst (played in the film with blithe and subtle villainy by the great Charles Dance), inasmuch as the subject of the film, the legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (whose friends called him “Mank” at his insistence, hence the film’s title), wrote Citizen Kane about Hearst. The film delves into one of the most hotly contested issues in film history: Who wrote Citizen Kane? Or, if Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote it, whose voice, political sensibilities, and artistic vision predominates? A great deal of ink has been spilled over this issue, including the storied book-length essay Raising Kane by the late, eminent film critic Pauline Kael, which appeared in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker early in 1971.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that this is relatively timely material, especially if you have a precocious cinephile (I knew quite a few back in the day) on your hands.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful to your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Itinerant (adj)

It must have popped up as a Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster at some point, so here is a context clues on the adjective itinerant.

This is, I think, probably a word educated people should know and be able to use. For high school students, it will connect well with the noun itinerary, which probably turns up in a variety of places like material about the Lewis and Clark expedition or a popular music group’s tour of the United States or, indeed, the world. Before automated digital mapping, I’ll hazard a guess that itinerary turned up in common usage more than it does now. Has itinerant suffered the same fate (if indeed itinerary has)? That’s an interesting question that could yield interesting answers to an interested student.

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.

The Weekly Text, April 16, 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Largest Seas from The Order of Things

Here is a lesson plan on the largest seas along with its accompanying combined reading and comprehension worksheet.

Like the other lessons under the rubric of The Order of Things by Barbara Ann Kipfer, this is a short lesson with plenty of room (and formatted in Microsoft Word for just that purpose) for expansion and adaptation. There’s an excursus on this material, arranged as a unit of 50 lessons (for now–it will inevitably expand when at last I return to classroom teaching) on the “About Posts & Texts” page on this site. I conceived and engineered these materials to use with students with relatively low levels of literacy and/or numeracy; it gives such students some structured materials to practice operating with two symbolic systems at the same time, namely words and numbers.

Anyway, over time, I’d like to continue building this unit, and then develop from it scaffolded, topic-specific subunits that respond to student interest, work to build literacy and numeracy, and help students feel confident in their ability to deal with what might once have seemed like insurmountably complicated material to them. What do you think?

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.

Cultural Literacy: Dark Ages

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Dark Ages.

In posting this document, I understand that I’m dealing with a contested term. In fact, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the period became better understood, historians began restricting its use to the Early Middle Ages, generally the first few centuries following the fall of Rome. When I was teaching global studies in New York, one of the concepts that was chronically overlooked while my co-teacher droned on in a recitation of decontextualized historical facts was the difference between periods of intellectual enlightenment and intellectual repression–indeed, the active promotion of ignorance and superstition.

If one looks at intellectual history, this oscillation between lightness and darkness, as Petrarch framed it, recurs fairly regularly (in fact, we’re arguably in the middle of such a period as I write this). I always thought that in teaching global studies, we ought to use the trial and death of Socrates as an illustration of the contest between intellectual freedom and the superstition and ignorance which opposes it. Once we accomplished that, we can cite this phenomenon everytime it expresses itself in history. It would make introducing the Carolingian Renaissance, the Renaissance itself, and the Enlightenment (and its antithesis, Romanticism) a simpler and deeper conceptual endeavor at once. In United States history, this dynamic expresses itself, I submit, in everything from the First and Second Great Awakenings to the McCarthy Era.

And we end up with those big concepts in historical inquiry that Claude Levi-Strauss called binary oppositions: faith and reason, law and anarchy, science and religion, knowledge and ignorance, and so forth. Those pairs, I think, are what Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe had in mind when they talked about identifying (and helping students to understand) “big ideas” in instructional planning.

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.