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.

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

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.

Ernest Hemingway

Here, first thing on a rainy Monday morning, is a short reading on Ernest Hemingway and its accompanying comprehension worksheet. It is a good general introduction to the author if you happen to be teaching one of his books.

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: The Pentagon Papers

Given the state of the nation, now seems as good a time as any to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Pentagon Papers. And thanks, Daniel Ellsberg,

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.

Winston Churchill

I can think of a number of settings where this reading on Winston Churchill and the comprehension worksheet that attends it might be handy. So here there they are if you want or need them.

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.

Exculpate (vt)

Since it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day yesterday, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb exculpate today. It’s used only transitively.

This probably isn’t a word that would see a lot of use in a high school classroom. On the other hand, if you have students looking down the road at careers in the law or law enforcement, who knows? May it is appropriate.

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.

Word Root Exercise: Hetero

Here’s a worksheet on the Greek word root hetero. It means, of course, different and other. The adjective heterogenous, used fairly regularly in certain domains of educated discourse, springs from this root, as to a number of English words, as the document will show you and your students.

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.

Cultural Literacy: Bohemian

Apropo of the post immediately below, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the noun and adjective bohemian. N.B. the lower case b, please, so that you know that this worksheet doesn’t refer to the territory in Czechoslovakia, but rather those of us who have chosen unconventional lifestyles, mostly in the pursuit of deeper study and appreciation of the arts and sciences.

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.

Independent Practice: The Renaissance

If you can use it, here is an independent practice worksheet on the Renaissance. There’s a lot of text in this document, so you have plenty of material to revise for emphasis or other purposes if you need to.

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.

Memento (n)

Ok, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun memento that I just whipped up because it is the Word of the Day in the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary app on my phone.

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, November 16, 2018: A Lesson Plan on Argumentation

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.