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: Iroquois League

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Iroquois League. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of on sentence and one comprehension question. In other words, a short, basic introduction to this indigenous nation.

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, 1 November 2024, National Native American Heritage Month Week I: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on the Pequot War

Today begins National Native American Heritage Month 2024. Unlike this blog’s (therefore my own) woeful deficiencies during Hispanic Heritage Month 2023 last month and in September, I have a full raft of materials to post this month–which contains five Fridays.

So the Weekly Text for today, Friday, 1 November 2014, is this reading on the Pequot War along with its attendant vocabulary-building and 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.

Common English Verbs Followed by an Object and an Infinitive: Allow

Here is a worksheet on the verb allow when used with an object and an infinitive. The New York City Subway does not allow passengers to smoke in stations and trains.

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.

Concepts in Sociology: Assimilation

A couple of years ago, I was assigned a sociology elective at my school. In the inimitably brilliant style of my school’s chief administrator, I learned of this three days before classes began. And of course there was, again typically, no curriculum for this course.

So I needed to come up with something in a hurry. I did, but let’s face it: developing a curriculum for a high school sociology course, let alone mastering its teaching, is a process that takes years: I really only had days, so I needed to move this process along quickly. I have a fair amount of material, but I fear it is of mixed quality. So, here is a worksheet on assimilation, the process by which immigrants integrate into their adopted nations and societies.

I would be particularly interested, if you use any of this material, and especially if you happen to know anything about sociology (I do, but clearly not enough for the endeavor to which I was deployed), to hear from you about 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.

The Weekly Text, 25 October 2024: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Like other avid readers, I expect, I have been watching the long overdue public advance of Percival Everett’s career. While I have yet to actually read his books, I did see American Fiction (based on his novel Erasure),  heard him interviewed in various places, and read a profile of him in The New Yorker. To call him interesting would be to considerably understate the case.

His most recent novel, James, re-imagines Mark Twain’s classic–and now controversial–American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave who travels with Huck. Jim’s humanity and his moral uprightness, as the novel proceeds, informs Huck’s morality and therefore criticizes the immorality, hypocrisy, and just plain horror of slavery.

So, it seeks like a good enough time to post as a Weekly Text this reading on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and 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.

Common English Verbs Followed by an Object and an Infinitive: Advise

Here is a the verb advise as followed by an object and an infinitive.The teacher advised his students to disregard the poorly designed material he presented.

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.

Common Errors in English Usage: Lend and Loan

From Paul Brians’ excellent book Common Errors in English Usage (to which, to remind readers once again, he allows free access at his webpage at Washington State University), here is a worksheet on the use of the verbs lend and loan. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of two long compound sentences (which might be better chopped up for emergent or struggling readers, or students for whom English is not a first language) and ten modified cloze exercises.

The gist of the work here involves students judging whether both of these are best used as verbs, or if lend is the verb and loan is the object being lent–and therefore only used as a noun.

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, 18 October 2024: A Lesson Plan on the Zodiac from The Order of Things

Once again, adapted from the pages of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s fascinating reference book The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on the Zodiac with its accompanying worksheet with a list of the Zodiac Signs as a reading and five comprehension questions.

As I do when I post these lessons, I want to emphasize that I designed them for struggling and emergent readers, or for students for whom English is not a first language. This work calls upon students to perform an analysis in two symbolic systems–numbers and words–of the material on the worksheet, something with which many students I have served over the years struggled.

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: Yucatan

OK, last but not least in documents posts for Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Yucatan. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and three comprehension questions. The document does note that the Yucatan is the site of “many Mayan ruins.”

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, 11 October 2024, Hispanic Heritage Month Week IV: A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893

For the final Friday of Hispanic Heritage Month 2024, here is the post for this month that bears the scantest relation to Hispanic History: a a reading on the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893 along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As this event’s name indicates (and if you’ve read Erik Larsen’s fascinating book The Devil in the White City, you know most if not all there is to know about the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition), it is related to Christopher Columbus, to wit the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the “New World.”

Certainly Spain’s arrival in the New World basically begins what we might consider Hispanic History, that’s how we come by the word Hispanic, after all. So there is marginal relevance here. I don’t know, this event seems like the conquistador’s round of self-congratulation for a job of genocide well done.

But as I said at the outset of this month, I am woefully under-inventoried where materials related to Hispanic History is concerned.

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.