Tag Archives: building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge

Influenza Vaccine

Posted on April 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on the influenza vaccination along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

Over the years, I have heard various public figures opine on the need for a return to a solid civics curriculum in public schools in the United States. In fact, two United States Senators recently introduced legislation, called the Educating for Democracy Act, that would invest $1 billion the development of civics education in our country. In general and particularly in the light how closely our country has veered toward fascism in the past several years, I must concede the point. Apropo of civics education, I submit that learning about the science of vaccines, and vaccine efficacy, is at the moment an integral element of civics education–not to mention part of a general education.

So here you are. There are other materials on this site about vaccine–just search vaccine or vaccination.

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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The Weekly Text, April 23, 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Latin Word Root Mill-, Milli-

Posted on April 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the lesson plan on the Latin word root, which mean, respectively, thousand and thousandth. I open this lesson with this worksheet on the noun century.  Here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the primary work of this lesson.

As you can see, these are very productive roots in English, yielding words like millennium and millipede. As I look at this lesson plan, I see that I intended to write two separate worksheets for these two roots. There are two separate listings for these roots,  but I don’t find, in the dictionary that informs this work, a separate word list for milli. In any case, these documents are, as the bulk of the material posted here, in Microsoft Word. So, it you wanted to add millimeter to the list of words to analyze and define, you can.

In any case, depending on the students you serve, there is plenty of room in this lesson for a freewheeling discussion on mill and milli, whether it is important to know both, and why.

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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Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Lesson Plans, The Weekly Text, Worksheets

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Write It Right: Involve for Entail

Posted on April 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Involve for Entail. ‘Proof of the charges will involve his dismissal.’ Not at all; it will entail it. To involve is, literally, to infold, not to bring about, nor cause to ensue. An unofficial investigation, for example, may involve character and reputation, but the ultimate consequence is entailed. A question, in the parliamentary sense, may involve a principal; its settlement one way or another may entail expense, or injury to interests. An act may involve one’s honor and entail disgrace.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Common Errors in English Usage: Pheasant (n), Peasant (n)

Posted on April 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is an English usage worksheet on the nouns pheasant and peasant. I’m not sure if the former word is essential to the high school lexicon, but the latter certainly is. Any study of history will necessitate the use of the word peasant.

But these worksheets–there will eventually be a hundred or more of them on Mark’s Text Terminal–is primarily usage, not vocabulary building, though I think vocabulary building could be a corollary benefit. I wrote these to meet the Common Core standard (L.11-12.1b), to wit, “Resolve issues of complex or contested usage, consulting references, (e.g., Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Garner’s Modern American Usage) as needed.” I hope they are useful in that way.

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 Concluding Assessment Lesson on Adverbs

Posted on April 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you search “lesson plan on adverbs” on this blog, you will find that there are a total of seven lesson plans dealing with this part of speech; here is the concluding assessment for the unit those seven lessons comprise.

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Because this lesson all but inevitably runs into a second day, here is another Cultural Literacy worksheet, this one on the idiom “six of one, a half dozen of the other.” Finally, here is the structured worksheet, which closely follows the sequence of the aforementioned seven lessons, that is the primary work of this lesson and the concluding assessment of this seven-lesson unit.

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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William Randolph Hearst

Posted on April 20, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on William Randolph Hearst along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.

If you have Netflix, the service’s recently released film Mank deals with William Randolph Hearst (played in the film with blithe and subtle villainy by the great Charles Dance), inasmuch as the subject of the film, the legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (whose friends called him “Mank” at his insistence, hence the film’s title), wrote Citizen Kane about Hearst. The film delves into one of the most hotly contested issues in film history: Who wrote Citizen Kane? Or, if Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote it, whose voice, political sensibilities, and artistic vision predominates? A great deal of ink has been spilled over this issue, including the storied book-length essay Raising Kane by the late, eminent film critic Pauline Kael, which appeared in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker early in 1971.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that this is relatively timely material, especially if you have a precocious cinephile (I knew quite a few back in the day) on your hands.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful to your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Itinerant (adj)

Posted on April 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

It must have popped up as a Word of the Day at Merriam-Webster at some point, so here is a context clues on the adjective itinerant.

This is, I think, probably a word educated people should know and be able to use. For high school students, it will connect well with the noun itinerary, which probably turns up in a variety of places like material about the Lewis and Clark expedition or a popular music group’s tour of the United States or, indeed, the world. Before automated digital mapping, I’ll hazard a guess that itinerary turned up in common usage more than it does now. Has itinerant suffered the same fate (if indeed itinerary has)? That’s an interesting question that could yield interesting answers to an interested student.

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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The Weekly Text, April 16, 2021: A Lesson Plan on the Largest Seas from The Order of Things

Posted on April 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a lesson plan on the largest seas along with its accompanying combined reading and comprehension worksheet.

Like the other lessons under the rubric of The Order of Things by Barbara Ann Kipfer, this is a short lesson with plenty of room (and formatted in Microsoft Word for just that purpose) for expansion and adaptation. There’s an excursus on this material, arranged as a unit of 50 lessons (for now–it will inevitably expand when at last I return to classroom teaching) on the “About Posts & Texts” page on this site. I conceived and engineered these materials to use with students with relatively low levels of literacy and/or numeracy; it gives such students some structured materials to practice operating with two symbolic systems at the same time, namely words and numbers.

Anyway, over time, I’d like to continue building this unit, and then develop from it scaffolded, topic-specific subunits that respond to student interest, work to build literacy and numeracy, and help students feel confident in their ability to deal with what might once have seemed like insurmountably complicated material to them. 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.

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A Concluding Assessment Lesson on Adjectives

Posted on April 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you search “lesson plan on adjectives” on this blog, you will find that there are a total of 11 lesson plans dealing with this part of speech; here is the concluding assessment lesson plan.

This lesson opens in my classroom with this Everyday Edit worksheet on Lucy Cousins’ Maisy books–and if your students enjoy the satisfaction of completing these exercises in correcting grammar, style, and spelling in another person’s prose (mine generally have), you can find a yearlong supply for download at no charge from the good people at Education World. This lesson generally extends across two days, so here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on malapropisms. Finally, here is the structured worksheet that closely follows the sequence of the 11 lessons that comprise this unit and serves as their concluding assessment.

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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Skyscrapers

Posted on April 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on skyscrapers along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. 

If memory serves, I wrote this, along with some other materials, for a student who possessed a considerable interest, bordering on obsession, with tall buildings. Like most of the materials based on Intellectual Devotional readings you’ll find on this site, this is a short but thorough general introduction to the topic. Keep an eye on it, though: this is one of those articles in which information can quickly go out of date. Indeed, I have revised this reading a couple of times as buildings get taller and taller.

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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