Here is a worksheet on the Greek root anth/o. It means, simply, flower. And while it is at the root of anthology for some reason, this worksheet uses words like anther, chrysanthemum, perianth, and polyanthus. In other words, all nice, solid, Greek, flower-related words.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a gilded cage, i.e. “to live in luxury but without freedom.” This is a half-page worksheet with a long, one-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. In other words, a short, punchy means of introducing students to this commonly used idiom in the English language.
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 sovereign as an adjective and another on sovereignty as a noun. These are a couple of words central to just about any instructional endeavor in social studies.
For the record, sovereign as an adjective, as it is pitched in the first worksheet, means “enjoying autonomy” and “independent.” As it happens, as an adjective, sovereign carries several meanings. As a noun, it means “one possessing or held to possess sovereignty,” “one possessing or held to possess supreme political power or sovereignty,” “one that exercises supreme authority within a limited sphere,” and “an acknowledged leader.” When we use this word in English, particularly in social studies courses, we mean king or queen.
You have no doubt noted that a sovereign is “held to possess sovereignty.” What does sovereignty, the subject of the second document, mean? For the purposes of the second worksheet, on sovereignty, it means “supreme power, especially over a body politic,” “freedom from external control,” “autonomy,” “controlling influence.” But again, this is a complicated word that isn’t exactly polysemous, but close to it.
You might ask students, if you’ve taught them the verb and noun reign, if they recognize a word they know inside sovereign or sovereignty. It’s a nice way to help students build the kind of semantic web that leads to transfer of learning.
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.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan on nations with the shortest coastlines. Here is the list as reading with comprehension questions. As the title of this post indicates, this is another lesson adapted from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s magisterial (I really want her job) reference book The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1997).
Nota bene, please, that I wrote these materials (there are quite a few of them on this blog now, with more to come) with the needs of students who struggle with reading in mind, especially when two symbolic systems (letters and numbers) are at work in the same lesson. If you find this lesson useful in your classroom, you might find its companion, a lesson on nations with the longest coastlines, which I published last month, a complement to the documents in this post.
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 reading on Blackbeard (aka Edward Teach) along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
Last weekend, for the first time, I watched Pirates of the Caribbean. So when I was perusing the Intellectual Devotional shelf in the warehouse earlier, this material caught my eye. It looks to me like the producers of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and the star, Johnny Depp (whose fey performance is both hilarious and oddly touching), were and are well aware of the life and times of Blackbeard (although he apparently appears in the series’ fourth film, played by the great Ian McShane). If you have students who are fans of these films, I would hazard a guess that this will be high-interest material for 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.
Here is a worksheet on differentiating between the adjectives fortuitous and fortunate. This is a full-page worksheet with ten modified cloze exercises that provide students an opportunity to use these words in a structured setting. You, however, can do with it as you wish, because like most things on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document.
Confusing these two words remains one of the most common lapses in usage I see on a regular basis. Just the other day I received an email whose author used fortuitous when she meant fortunate. I suppose it’s the sound of these two words that makes them so easy to misuse. For the record, fortuitous means, simply, “occurring by chance.” Fortunate, on the other hand, means “bringing some good thing not foreseen as certain,” “receiving some unexpected good.” or, more simply, “lucky.” As the reading in this document points out, a car accident can be fortuitous in that it occurs by chance, but few people would characterize it as fortunate.
This is a contested area of usage. I’ll guess that if you looked up fortuitous in Garner’s Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner would tell you that the use of fortuitous to mean fortunate has gained widespread acceptance in the American vernacular. Nonetheless, sticklers continue to emphasize the distinction limned above. What do you think? More importantly, what do your students think? Should a sharp distinction between these words continue to be observed? That’s an essential question in usage, I submit: how do words maintain their narrow meanings and therefore, arguably, their integrity?
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on ghettos. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions.
Generally, I try to guide students toward the definition of ghetto that characterizes the concept the word represents as “a quarter of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure.” If you need to teach about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April of 1943, this worksheet could serve as a good instruction: the first sentence reports that ghettos were, “Originally, areas of medieval cities in which Jews were compelled to live.” However, the second sentence continues, “Today, the term usually refers to sections of American cities inhabited by the poor.” Happily, then, this document does not racialize the noun ghetto–making it, I would argue, useful for opening a discussion about the racialization of certain words in English–if you’re so inclined to do so.
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 Latin word roots duc and duct. They mean to lead. You’ll find this root in a variety of high-frequency words in English, including conduct, deduce, deduct, and seduce. You’ll also find it in aqueduct and abduct.
So, there are a total of eight words on this worksheet, all of them, nearly inarguably, words students should know before they graduate high school. I hope this document presents an efficient way to inculcate these words into students’ vocabulary.
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.
“Aphorism (noun): A statement that succinctly frames a principle; a short, compelling observation of general truth. Adj. aphoristic; adv. aphoristically; n. aphorist; v. aphorize
‘In a section titled “The Art of Love,” she remarks, with aphoristic felicity, “In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.”’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
It’s the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster, so here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective aghast. It means “struck with terror, amazement, or horror” and “shocked.”
The word derives from the Middle English verb gasten, “to frighten.” As you may perceive, this is also the source of the adjective ghastly. Not surprising, I suppose, since things that are ghastly generally cause us to feel aghast.
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.
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