If you can use them, here are a reading on Alexander Graham Bell with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. There’s not much to day beyond that–other than for the right student, this may well be high-interest material.
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 lovely Monday morning in Brooklyn, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root spectro. It means simply, just as it sounds, “spectrum.” You’ll find this root at the base of many scientific words like spectrograph, spectrometer, and spectroscope; but more commonly used English words like suspect and speculate also grow from this root.
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 is a context clues worksheet on caustic used as an adjective. For that part of speech caustic means “capable of destroying or eating away by chemical action” and “corrosive.” Nota bene, please, that this word is also used as a noun, whose meaning is “a caustic agent,” and “a substance that burns or destroys organic tissue by chemical action. This worksheet is set up for building an understanding of caustic as an adjective.
However, because this document is formatted in Microsoft Word, if you want to revise this to teach the noun, the document is yours (as are almost everything you’ll find on Mark’s Text Terminal) to manipulate as your wish or as your student need.
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 is a worksheet on the verb avoid and its use with gerunds. Every time I post one of these, I wonder whether I should just toss the rest of them. I made over 100 of them, second-guessing myself the whole time. Anyway, as previously mentioned, for practical purposes, I have unlimited storage space on this blog. I’ll continue to post these in the hope that someone finds them useful.
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.
OK, I continue to break into new material I developed during the pandemic. This pair of Cultural Literacy worksheets really should go out together. The first is a worksheet on the topic sentence of a paragraph. This is a half-page document with a two-sentence reading two comprehension questions.
That document’s obvious complement is this worksheet on the paragraph, as the reading nicely summarizes it, as the “basic unit of prose.” This is also a half-page document, but you’ll find a three-sentence reading with three comprehension questions.
In other words, a good general introduction, in two parts, to the paragraph in form and purpose.
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 worksheet on on the Greek word roots rrhea, rrhoea, and rrhag. They mean flow, excessive flow, and discharge. You probably won’t be surprise to find these roots inside English words like diarrhea, gonorrhea, and hemorrhage. Like most of the Greek word roots I’ve posted her over the years, this one will be useful for students planning careers in the health care professions.
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.
Previously on the blog, I’ve conveyed my doubts about the quality of work that appear under the header above. Since I have nearly unlimited storage space on this blog, and because they are already made, and because perhaps there is a chance someone might find them useful, I will continue to post these documents. Without further ado, here is a worksheet on using gerunds with the verb acknowledge.
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.
While I very much doubt there will be much demand for it, here nonetheless is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Vidkun Quisling. This is full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences and five comprehension questions.
Quisling’s surname name became a synonym for traitor and collaborator after his decision, which this document covers, to collaborate with the Nazis during during the German occupation of Norway in World War II. I first encountered this use while reading Christopher Simpson’s excellent book Blowback many years ago; he uses the term, in that study, “quisling governments” to describes the complicity of officials in the Soviet Baltic states and Ukraine in the Holocaust, particularly the events depicted in a film like Defiance–i.e. the role of the Einsatzgruppen in the early days of the the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
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.
If you can use it, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun cant. It means, within the context the sentences in this document supply, “affected singsong or whining speech” and especially “the expression or repetition of conventional or trite opinions or sentiments; especially : the insincere use of pious words.” I don’t know whether students need to know this word or not; I am fairly confident, however, that whenever a mass shooting occurs in this country, and politicians take to Twitter to intone about their thoughts and prayers, that we hear cant in its purest form.
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.
During the month of June Mark’s Text Terminal will offer a four-lesson unit on Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021, Oscar-winning documentary, Summer of Soul. As you probably know, this film compellingly documents, using the long-lost footage the late Hal Tulchin shot, of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival held in Mount Morris Park, now known as Marcus Garvey Park.
Without further ado, and in keeping with the general practice at Mark’s Text Terminal of keeping the documents up front (ahead of my bloviation, that is) in posts, here is the first lesson plan of the Summer of Soul unit. I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Black Arts Movement, which I think is particularly salient to both this lesson and this unit. Here is a worksheet to guide research into the principals–spread across 50 years–involved in the production of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and the long overdue documentary on it, Summer of Soul. Finally, here is the poster or handbill (or both) from the event itself.
Now, if you would like to develop this unit further (there is plenty of room for that, it seems to me, particularly if your students are interested), here is the unit plan. To write additional lessons, should you want it, here is the lesson plan template. If you write further lessons for this unit, and want to create materials using the format in these documents, here is the worksheet template.
Finally, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the A.M.E. Church (i.e. the African Methodist Episcopal Church) that I stacked in the planning materials folder for future use. One direction this unit might go further with, or serve as a jumping-off point for another unit, say, on the Black Church, using Henry Louis Gates’ recent series on the subject to explore the connection between the Black Church and the Civil Rights Movement. There was a a gospel day at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival–including, movingly, Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples sharing a microphone–and the film performs a badly needed service in making the connection not only between the Black Church and the Civil Rights Movement explicit, but also the connection between the Black Church and soul music. I don’t know about you, but sometimes when I listen to some old O’Jays records, it sounds like the men in the group left their church choir rehearsal and went straight to Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s recording studio. “Love Train,” in fact, is arguably a gospel song.
OK: more (perhaps considerably more) said than necessary. If this material interests you, stay tuned for the next three Fridays at Mark’s Text Terminal to collect the next three lessons.
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, film/television/photography, high-interest materials, music, philosophy/religion, questioning/inquiry, readings/research, united states history
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