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.

Term of Art: Small School Movement

“small schools movement: A movement initiated in the 1970s, mainly in New York City, to establish small schools. Some of these schools were alternative schools for adolescents in need of intensive remediation, whereas others set out to demonstrate that students would get a better education in schools containing fewer than 500 students. Interest in the small schools movement was propelled by pioneers Deborah Meier and her Central Park East schools in East Harlem in New York City and Theodore Sizer and his Coalition of Essential Schools. The movement continued to grow during the 1980s and 1990s and gained momentum with the commitment of $1 billion by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the late 1990s. With funding from the Gates Foundation, many cities across the United States agreed to divide their high schools into small schools. Advocates claim that small schools offer a warmer, more personalized climate than do large schools and consequently boast higher achievement, attendance, and graduation rates. Critics contend that the small schools are unable to mount a strong curriculum with advanced courses and that the administrative costs of small schools are excessive, the burden on teachers is greater, and the academic results are uncertain.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

The Weekly Text, 15 April 2022: A Lesson Plan on Using Prepositions

The Weekly Text on this Tax Day (actually, Tax Day this year is on Monday, 18 April) is the penultimate lesson, a sentence writing review, of seven-lesson unit on the use of prepositions. Without further ado, then, here is the lesson plan.

I open this lesson with this Everyday Edit worksheet on author Yoshiko Uchida; in the event the lesson stretches into a second day, here is another on Basketball’s Beginnings. (And to give credit where it is so deservedly due, the good people at Education World allow access at no cost to a calendar year’s worth of Everyday Edit worksheets, should you find these useful documents work well for your students.) Here is the sentence-writing review worksheet. If you need it, here is the learning support for commonly used prepositions that I work to keep by students’ sides throughout this unit. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.

Next week I’ll publish as the Weekly Text the assessment lesson for this unit. Then Mark’s Text Terminal will be able to offer a complete seven-lesson unit on using prepositions in prose.

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.

Articulate (adj), Articulate (vi/vt)

Here is a pair of context clues worksheet for articulate used as an adjective and a verb. These documents require, I think, a bit of exposition: these are complicated words, and the worksheet itself is keyed to specific meanings of these words and the parts of speech for which they function. Let’s start with the adjective: the sentences in the first document seek to move student toward inferring the adjectival definition of articulate as “expressing oneself readily, clearly, or effectively.”

The verb is another matter. First of all, it is used both intransitively and transitively. Intransitively, it means “to utter articulate sounds,” “to utter clear and understandable sounds,” and, less relevantly to the matter at hand, “to become united or connected by or as if by a joint” (e.g. the articulated buses one sees in big-city public transportation systems worldwide). Transitively, articulate means “to give clear and effective utterance to,” “put into words,”  “to utter distinctly,” and “to give definition to (as a shape or object).” But it too carries the meaning” to unite by or as if by means of a joint” as above.

In any case, the second page of this document seeks to elicit the more common definitions of the verb, which is, transitively “to give clear and effective utterance to,” and “put into words.”  And that’s more than enough said about the use of articulate (don’t forget the stress shifts to the final syllable for the verb) as a verb and as an adjective.

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.

Word Root Exercise: Post

Moving right along on this spring morning, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root post. It means, of course, “after” and “behind.” I feel confident that I need not belabor the productivity of this root–and as I write this, I wonder why I didn’t include this root in the two yearlong (one lesson per week) cycles of word root lessons for building vocabulary I wrote for freshman and sophomore English classes. In fact, as you certainly know, post can be attached to just about any noun to form the meaning of “after something.”

This worksheet, in any case, asks students to infer the meaning of the root from such high-frequency English words as postdate, posterior (which also gives us posterity, which is not on this document), and posthumous.

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, 8 April 2022: A Lesson Plan on the Denominations of U.S. Paper Currency from The Order of Things

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the denominations of paper currency in the United States from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s excellent reference book, The Order of Things. For students, here is the combined reading and comprehension worksheet to use for this lesson.

Nota bene please that I conceived of and prepared this material for students who find it a challenge to navigate and manipulate two symbolic systems–that is, numbers and letters–at the same time. This is a comfortable way to ease into more complicated work like word problems in math–or at least I like to think it is.

But 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.

Argot (n)

Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun argot. It means “an often more or less secret vocabulary and idiom peculiar to a particular group.” I assume this was a Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster at some point, because this is not exactly a high-frequency word in the English language. In fact, I think there is a case to be made that argot is a linguistic term of art rather than a noun in everyday use.

So, unless you are teaching a unit on, or mounting a production of, Guys and Dolls (or if you need to explain the patter in a Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, or Chester Himes novel, or explain the use of an adjective like “two-bit”) I expect this document will have little utility in the primary or secondary classroom. But what the hell, I wrote it, I have basically unlimited storage capacity on this blog, and maybe someone can use 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.

Administer (vi/vt)

Here is a context clues worksheet on the verb administer. It is used both intransitively and transitively. The sentences in this document, however, are keyed to this verb’s first transitive definition, “to manage or supervise the execution, use, or conduct of.” Ergo, you will note that all the sentences on this worksheet use administer with a direct object–i.e. transitively.

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: Op, Ops, Opt/o, Opthalm/o, Opia, Opsy

Finally this morning, here is a worksheet on the Greek word roots op, ops,opt/o, opthalm/o,-opia, and opsy. They mean, variously, eye, visual condition, vision, sight, and inspection. This is a productive set of roots from which grow a diverse vocabulary that includes (on this document), autopsy, biopsy, ophthalmology, and synopsis.

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: Superconductivity

OK, moving right along here at the crack of doom on this Friday morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on superconductivity. This is a half-page document with a reading of two compound sentences that yield three comprehension questions. I understand (I think–I am not a science teacher) that this is not a concept that is part of the general science curriculum in primary and secondary schools. But for the right student? In my experience this is a very useful short piece of work.

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: If (conj), Whether (conj)

Here is a worksheet on the use of the conjunctions if and whether in both casual speech and formal prose. The distinction, as Professor Paul Brians points out (this and all other materials under the heading above are based on his book Common Errors in English Usage, to which he allows access at no charge at the Washington State University website) is stylistic. Anyway, this is a full-page worksheet with ten sentences for analysis.

But, like practically everything on this blog, this document is formatted in Microsoft Word. You can do what you want with it–it is, as I believe the term of art has it, open source.

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.