Tag Archives: building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge

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

Here is a worksheet on the verb teach when used with an object and an infinitive.

Carlos teaches his dog Sidney to fetch the ball.

The boy taught his mother to speak English more fluently.

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: Status Quo

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a status quo. This Latinism–which means “the state in which”–is a high frequency term in English, especially among educated people. In any event, this is a half-page worksheet with a two sentences and three comprehension questions.

The first sentence is a compound with a colon in the middle of it. If that’s too much for emergent readers or users of English as a second language, simply remove the colon, replace it with a period, and write “For example” in front of the quote that follows.

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, 19 December 2025: The Writing Revolution Templates II; Worksheets

As we slide into the holidays (there will be no Weekly Texts for the next two Fridays), this week’s Text is a list of worksheet templates developed from Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s excellent framework for writing instuction, The Writing Revolution (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017). First of all, here is the worksheets templates table of contents. And here are the worksheet templates themselves:

II-A*What Makes a Sentence a Sentence; Fragments, Scrambled Sentences, and Run-Ons

II-B*Piece It Together; Unscrambling Scrambled Sentences

II-C*Put the Brakes On; Correcting Run-On Sentences

II-D*Four Types of Sentence Writing, Declarative, Imperative, Interrogative and Exclamatory (Four Templates in One Document)

II-E*What Do You Know? Developing Questions

II-F*Let’s Play Jeopardy; Giving Students the Answers and Asking for Questions

II-G*The Power of Basic Conjunctions Because, But, So

II-H*How to Say It in Writing–Ten Subordinating Conjunctions Distributed Over Three Worksheet Templates

II-I*Another Name for a Noun; Appositive and Matching Appositives (Two Templates in One Document)

II-J*Put Them Together; Sentence Combining

II-K* Sentence Expansion; Bigger and Better–Expanding Sentences to Expand Students’ Knowledge and Responses and What Do You See? Using Sentence Expansion to Write Captions for Pictures (Two Templates in One Document)

II-L*The Power of Note-Taking–To Note-Taking Formats Distributed Over Two Worksheet Templates

II-M*Sentence with a Semicolon Stop

II-N*Sentence with a Colon Stop

II-O*Sentence Stem with a Coordinating Conjunction

II-P*Sentence Stem with an Elision for Parentheses

II-Q*Sentence Stem with Like or As to Produce an Analogy or a Simile

II-R*Partial Sentence with the Conjunctions Except, But, and Although to Join Contrary or Contradictory Pieces of Information

II-S*Which One Doesn’t Belong? Eliminating the Lease Relevant Sentence

II-T*Summary Sentence Worksheet

II-U*Select Appropriate Details from the List to Support Each Topic Sentence

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.

Quarto

“Quarto: A book, measuring not larger than 9 ½ by 12 ½ inches, which is composed of sheets folded into four leaves.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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

Here is a worksheet on the verb require when used with an object and an infinitive.

Good manners require us to wash our hands before sitting down to dinner.

Speed limits require motorists to drive at a given rate of speed.

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: Stanford-Binet Scale

If you can use it, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Stanford-Binet Scale. As you probably know, this instrument purports to measure intelligence and rate it using an “Intelligence Quotient“–which gives us “IQ.” Over time, there have been questions (as well their should be) about the validity of this scale.

I can’t really comment on that. What I can tell you is that this is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. This is just the sparest of introductions to this high-stakes assessment, about which the late Steven Jay Gould (for which I thank him) had some things to say.

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.

Derogatory, Derogative

“Derogatory, Derogative (adjective): Expressing unfavorable criticism or low opinion; detracting; belittling, Adverb: derogatorily; noun; derogation; verb: derogate.

‘The patient all this while continued slouching and hunching about the room, poking into corners and picking up and fingering objects for derogatory comment.’ Peter De Vries, Madder Music”

 Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

The Weekly Text, 12 December 2025: The Writing Revolution Templates I; Lesson Plans

OK, I don’t know if I suggested comprehensiveness in these materials, but I think I may have achieved it (or else divulged to the world the degree of my obsessiveness) with them. What you have here, listed in this table of contents, are 18 lesson plan templates that follow the framework of Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s The Writing Revolution (San Francisco: Jossey Bass: 2017).

Without further ado, here are the templates, which are numbered as they are in the table of contents, with the Roman numeral one and the Roman alphabet letter following.

I-A*What Makes a Sentence a Sentence; Fragments, Scrambled Sentences, and Run-Ons

I-B*Piece it together; Unscrambling Scrambled Sentences

I-C*Put the Brakes On; Correcting Run-On Sentences

I-D*Four Types of Sentence Writing, Declarative, Imperative, Interrogative and Imperative (Four Templates in One Document)

I-E*What Do You Know? Developing Questions

I-F*Let’s Play Jeopardy; Giving Students the Answers and Asking for Questions

I-G*The Power of Basic Conjunctions, Because, But, and So

I-H*How to Say It in Writing; Subordinating Conjunctions

I-I*Another Name for a Noun, Appositives and Matching Appositives (Two Templates in One Document)

I-J*Put Them Together; Sentence Combining

I-K*Sentence Expansion–Bigger and Better, Expanding Sentences to Expand Students’ Knowledge and Responses and What Do You See? Using Sentence Expansion to Write Captions for Pictures (Two Templates in One Document)

I-L*The Power of Note-Taking; Key Words and Phrases, Abbreviations, and Symbols

I-M*Sentence with a Semicolon Stop

I-N*Sentence with a Colon Stop

I-O*Sentence Stem with a Coordinating Conjunction

I-P*Sentence Stem with and Elision for Parentheses

I-Q*Sentence Stem with Like or As to Produce and Analogy or a Simile

I-R*Partial Sentence with the Conjunctions Except, But, and Although to Join Contrary or Contradictory Pieces of Information

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: Remind

Here is a on the verb remind when used with an object and an infinitive.

Carl reminded Alex to set the alarm clock.

The teacher reminds the students daily to complete their 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.

Cultural Literacy: Subject

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the noun subject as a grammatical term–i.e. the subject of a sentence. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and four comprehension questions.

But, as with most of these documents, there are a couple of caveats here: these are long and busy sentences with several colons and semicolons in play. And the worksheet itself is a bit crowded. I use other materials in my units to teach subjects, so I haven’t used this. If I did, I would probably rewrite the sentences to simplify them, then turn this into a full-page worksheet. Clarifying the meaning of the polysemous word subject, and helping students understand how a subject operates in a sentence, strike me as foundational material in the high school curriculum.

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.