Tag Archives: building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge

Cultural Literacy: Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining

Posted on July 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “every cloud has a silver lining.” This is a half-page worksheet with the barest of reading, one simple sentence, and three questions.

Two of the questions (namely two and three) ask students to apply their understanding of this expression by identifying an instance in their own life in which a cloud had a silver lining–or, as the reading as it, “Every misfortune has its positive aspect.” Then students are asked to compose a simple declarative sentence that includes this proverb.

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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J. Edgar Hoover

Posted on July 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on J. Edgar Hoover along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. From the Intellectual Devotional series, this is a good general introduction to Hoover’s biography.

Any “good” biography of J. Edgar Hoover must by definition include his subversion of democracy, via COINTELPRO, during his reign as FBI Director. Hoover was a nasty piece of work, and he’s just the kind of villain that students find fascinating; he’s also a good figure with which to begin a critical examination of United States history in the twentieth century, including the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War upheavals. It’s an established fact that COINTELPRO monitored Malcolm X closely; his daughters, earlier this year, released a letter from the late New York City Police officer Raymond Wood in which Detective Wood confessed to participating with the FBI in the conspiracy to murder Malcolm. Netflix has done an admirable job of exposing this with the excellent documentary series Who Killed Malcolm X? I found it riveting.

In other words, these two documents are a gateway to some juicy, engaging stuff. I can already think of two students of mine who would have engaged deeply in a unit around these circumstances and events.

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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A Learning Support on Writing the Compound Sentence with a Semicolon and No Conjunction

Posted on July 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a learning support on writing the compound sentence with a semicolon and no conjunction. This is a full page of text, but like everything else here, you can do with it as you wish: it is formatted in Microsoft Word.

I have a lesson plan in the works on this piece of procedural knowledge, so check back if this is something you want your students to be able to do.

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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Bivouac (vi/vt)

Posted on July 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on bivouac as a verb. It’s used intransitively to mean “to make a bivouac, camp” and “to take shelter often temporarily”; transitively it means “to provide temporary quarters for (they were bivouacked in the gym during the storm).”

The word is also used as a noun to mean “a usually temporary encampment under little or no shelter,” “encampment usually for a night,” and “a temporary or casual shelter or lodging.”

Why use bivouac as a verb (or a noun for that matter?) rather than the simpler, arguably stouter camp? I don’t know that I would, but it is a matter of diction and style. Bivouac as either a verb or a noun is not a high-frequency word in English. This worksheet, perhaps, could be used as an assessment to test students’ ability to engage in the high-powered comprehension strategy of inferring meaning from context. If you use a lot of context clues-related material in your classroom, throwing in a word like bivouac from time to time does strike me as a quick means of assessment. What do you think?

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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Cultural Literacy: Ego

Posted on July 28, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of ego. This is a half-page worksheet; the reading is three sentences, though two of them are longish compounds, and there are three comprehension questions.

This is a concept students should understand. The virtue of the reading in this document is that it situates the ego in Freud’s structural theory of mind, (without, interestingly, ever mentioning Sigmund Freud himself) so students will also learn about the id and the superego. This is a good general introduction to this subject. That said, there is clearly room to expand this document (easy for you to accomplish, since like everything on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document) for further exploration or exposition of psychoanalytic theory. If I were to expand this in any way, I would make sure students walked away with a basic understanding of Freud’s biography and his ideas about the psyche.

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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Cuckold

Posted on July 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Cuckold: The husband of an adulterous wife. The name derives from cuckoo, the chief characteristic of this bird being to deposit its eggs in other birds’ nests. Dr. Johnson explained that ‘it was usual to alarm a husband at the approach of an adulterer by calling Cuckoo, which by mistake was applied in time to the person warned.’ The cuckold was traditionally supposed to wear horns as the attribute of his condition. The usage is ancient; the Romans used to call an adulterer a cuckoo.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Word Root Exercise: Apo-

Posted on July 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

OK, last but not least on this summer afternoon, here is a worksheet on the Greek word root apo–. It means away, from, off, and separate.

I don’t know if I’ve ever used this document in the classroom, which isn’t surprising, since I have hundreds of these worksheets. I tend to use the most productive roots, with words that students must use to navigate the secondary common branch curricula, in my weekly instructional period dedicated to word roots and vocabulary. Still, you’ll find this root at the basis of apogee, apology, apostle, and apostrophe among other relatively high frequency words in English, so it might be worth asking students to take a look at it. I think I would be inclined to modify it into a shorter, simpler pattern recognition exercise. Because this is a Microsoft Word document, you too can manipulate it to your purposes.

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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Containment

Posted on July 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on the United States’ policy of containment along with its accompanying vocabulary-buidling and comprehension worksheet.

This is a good general introduction to this piece of United States foreign policy toward the Soviet Union after World War II. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is the best short introduction to the topic I’ve seen, presenting the biographies and motivations of the key players, to wit, George F. Kennan and President Harry Truman, as well as a quick analysis of the policy itself.

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.

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Common Errors in English Usage: Every (adj)

Posted on July 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a worksheet on the use of every, which is an adjective, but which readily joins with words like body and one to give us nouns like everybody and everyone. These are singular nouns, so they take singular verb forms. That’s the gist of this worksheet–but there is a small excursus on the use of their with these nouns in the interest of avoiding gendered pronouns, and therefore sexism in language.

The worksheet consists of 10 modified cloze exercises, which you may modify further, as this is an open source document formatted in Microsoft Word. Which, like all of the documents under the header of Common Errors in English Usage, are informed by Paul Brians’ excellent book of the same name, which he has posted on the Washington State University website. 

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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Urbane (adj)

Posted on July 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s the Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective urbane. It means “notably polite or polished in manner.” You probably won’t be surprised to hear that Merriam-Webster offers suave as a synonym.

This is not, I guess, a frequently used word in English. But it does show up in educated discourse, particularly in periodicals and newspapers. In any event, whether one teaches urbane or suave, the concept of “notably polite or polished in manner” is one students ought to have a word to represent.

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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