It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective histrionic. This is a solid modifier that is so commonly used in English that high school students probably ought to learn it.
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.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so I developed this context clues worksheet on the noun bromide just now. I won’t argue that this is a word high school students need to know; at the same time, given the debauched state of our political discourse, I think this is a word whose time is now.
That said, the current administration obviously prefers a thumb-in-the-eye style of communications. Given that this word means (outside of describing a binary chemical compound of bromine and something else) “a commonplace or tiresome person: BORE” and “a commonplace or hackneyed statement or notion,” a political leader who, after 130,000 deaths and rising in a pandemic says everything is just fine, isn’t just indulging in a weakness for the commonplace idiocies of bromides, he is showing delusion, mendacity, and cruelty.
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.
English teachers, do you teach Jane Austen? I’ve worked in a couple of high schools, and I don’t recall that she was taught in either place. I put together this reading on Jane Austen and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet for a student who had seen the 1995 film Clueless, discovered that it was based on Jane Austen’s novel Emma, and wanted to know more about that novel, a comedy of manners.
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 is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Otto von Bismarck. I can’t imagine how one teaches or understands the history of modern Europe, and Germany over the past two centuries, or even, arguably, modern conservatism, without knowing something about the Iron Chancellor. This is a full page worksheet, suitable for independent practice (i.e. homework).
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.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s word of the day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the verb emulate. It’s only used transitively, so don’t forget your direct object: One must emulate something or someone.
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.
Because it was recently Merriam-Webster’s word of the day, in the interests of my own ongoing cognitive agility (like everyone else, I am not getting any younger), I wrote this context clues worksheet on the noun legerdemain. It means both “sleight of hand” and “a display of skill or adroitness.” It’s probably not anyone’s idea of a word kids really must know by their high school graduation.
So I almost skipped developing this worksheet. Yet, it nagged at me. At this point, I have spent my career as a teacher in the service of struggling students. One of the things I noticed my charges struggled with, year in and year our, was abstractions and concepts. Since most kids know what magic and card tricks are, I saw an opportunity to show them both the abstract and the concrete using this word. Parenthetically, I think one of the reasons so many struggling learners tend to tussle with abstractions is that they have been taught not to trust their perceptions. Here, I submit, is a word that can help them learn to know and trust the accuracy of their perceptions because they possess the relatively simple prior knowledge to understand it.
Or maybe not. In any case, I’m just sayin’.
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.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Bomb Sight.” I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “pride goeth before a fall.” You’ll need this scan of the illustration and questions that drive the case to conduct your investigation. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key so that you and your students can solve the case and arrest the suspected felon and bring him or her to the bar of justice.
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.
If you have any budding comic strip drafters, graphic novelists, or just kids who like to draw in your cohort (I’ve had quite a few over the years), then this reading on the comic strip Doonesbury and its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet might be of interest to them. In my experience, this reading has been high-interest material for a certain kind of student, especially once they’ve seen the strip itself–available in most daily newspapers and, of course, online. If you had told me that more than forty years after I was introduced to this strip in high school it would still be going strong in 2020, I don’t know if I would have believed it.
So, if nothing else, the topical nature of Doonesbury and its longevity, inextricably intertwined as they are, is an area for some critical inquiry.
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.
Moving right along on this rainy morning in Vermont, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root purg. It means clean, and is a very productive root in English and the Romance languages. However, as you will see, you and your students, where words that grow around this root are concerned, will need to think broadly and figuratively about the definition of clean.
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.
Here’s an English usage worksheet on differentiating the use of the adjectives continual and continuous. The distinction is narrow, but worth observing.
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.
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