I don’t imagine I need to go on and on about this worksheet on the Latin word root aqua. It means, of course, water. It’s hard to imagine a situation in which students wouldn’t need a thoroughgoing knowledge of this root and the words in English that grow from 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.
Here are a pair of context clues worksheets on supply as both a noun and a verb. As a verb, it is used both transitively and intransitively.
I worked in an economics-themed high school for ten years, so you’ll understand the word in two parts of speech.
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.
Have you seen Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York? Or perhaps read Herbert Asbury’s book, The Gangs of New York, from which most of the historical material in the film is drawn? You might also have come across Tyler Anbinder’s book–highly recommended, if the subject interests you–on the infamous Lower Manhattan neighborhood which is now subsumed by Chinatown. I became interested in the district after seeing Mr. Scorsese’s film, and spent some time reading, thinking about, and visiting it.
For my esteemed colleagues teaching in New York City, I can assure you from direct experience with my own students in The Bronx and Manhattan that this reading on the Five Points is generally of high interest to kids in the Five Boroughs. Here is the reading’s accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
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.
While the words that spring from it are mostly technical in nature, here, nonetheless, if you can use it, is a worksheet on the Greek word root meso; it will most likely show up in the noun Mesoamerica or the adjective Mesoamerican in most classrooms. In any case, it means middle.
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.
On a morning of soft sunlight and warm temperatures in Western Massachusetts, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb affiliate. It has both intransitive and transitive uses.
And this worksheet, like just about everything on Mark’s Text Terminal, is in Microsoft Word. That means you can convert it to a worksheet on affiliate as a noun, should you see fit.
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.
Given the recent outbreak of bigotry in this country (I guess we were all aware of this persistent latent tendency in the American mind, but yeesh, you know?), I’m hard-pressed to think of a better time to post this reading on the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
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.
While cleaning out the last of some social studies folder, I stumbled across this list of big ideas and planning questions for the freshman global studies classes I taught for several years in New York City. The form and content of this document clearly derives from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s book Understanding by Design, which continues to inform my approach to planning lessons. This looks like something I started brainstorming one day, but then never returned to.
Maybe you can do something with 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.
Since it is a word that students probably ought to know by high school, but if they don’t, I offer this context clues worksheet on the verb negotiate, which is used both intransitively and transitively. When I have English language learners in the mix of a class, I’ll often use this to get it into their lexicons at their earliest convenience.
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.
While I have used the materials in this week’s Text in a variety of configurations, including, most often in a unit on the procedural knowledge necessary to produce research papers, I also keep it around as a standalone, which I call the “Research Paper in Miniature Lesson Plan” I wrote this several years ago after observing, in the school in which I worked, that teachers assigned synthetic research papers without any explicit instruction on the how and, perhaps more importantly, the why of citing sources when preparing such a document.
Today’s Text is, then, basically, a lesson plan on citing sources. I have opened this lesson, for reasons I think I can safely assume are obvious, with this context clues worksheet on the noun evidence; if, for some reason, this lesson runs into a second instructional period, I keep nearby this second context clues worksheet on the noun bibliography in case I need it. Finally, the mainstay of this lesson is this worksheet on the why and how of citing sources.
As I’ve worked with this lesson over the years, I have come to regard it (and you might find this a useful way of thinking about it as well) as an outline or template for a series of such lessons. Depending on what you’re working on in your classroom, an hour or so of editing and reconfiguring would transmute this lesson for use with a variety of short readings. In other words, whatever your domain is, and whatever content you are teaching, it could be adapted to work with this lesson and vice versa.
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.
Across the almost 16 years I worked in New York City, I sought to teach students how to write cogently and grammatically. I won’t go into my “philosophy” of teaching writing, which really isn’t much of a philosophy other than to use methods and materials appropriate for the students in front of me. That said, very early on I recognized the importance of teaching English usage. Put another way, writing is using the English language, and we owe it to our students to assist them in developing their understanding of how to use the language as effectively as possible.
So I was encouraged when several years ago I was reviewing the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts for grades 11-12 and found, under “Conventions of Standard English,” this expectation: “Standard (L.11-12.1b)-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.” The first of the two titles listed, the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage is first rate, like everything else I’ve seen from that publishing house. That said, the Merriam-Webster’s may be a bit too technical for struggling learners, emergent readers, and English language learners.
By the same token, I have little doubt that Garner’s Modern American Usage is too technical for all but the most advanced readers and writers. This is a book, in my estimation, written for professional writers. Brian Garner is a linguist and lexicographer par excellence, and he writes, for the most part in a register for his peers. If it means anything, while I admire Mr. Garner’s work, I myself tend to lean more heavily on Merriam-Webster’s usage dictionary.
But what to do for students, particularly struggling students? By chance, I hit on using Paul Brians’ fine book, Common Errors in English Usage (Portland, OR: William James & Co., 2013). Amazingly, Professor Brians appears to have made the whole book available for free under that hyperlink, and if you want a PDF of it, it is also available here for free. That solves my problem of presenting his material in worksheet form without infringing on his copyright.
I chose about 200 entries from Common Errors in English Usage as the basis of a new set of short exercises to teach usage. Another 50 or so entries from the book will show up here as homophone worksheets. Today, however, I offer the first Common Errors in English Usage on the nouns admission and admittance. As I write these, I find that they are a way not so much of dealing with the words themselves–though they do that too–but about exploring the concept of proper usage in prose. Because of that, I expect that there will be a good deal of class discussion of the context of these sentences and which word fits most appropriately in them.
Remember that this is a new kind of document at Mark’s Text Terminal. I feel some chagrin in admitting that I have not used the worksheet appended here in the classroom. I use a lot of materials like it, so I can say with the modest confidence of experience that this is probably sound material. That said, if you have ever considered offering your comments on the material on Mark’s Text Terminal, I would particularly appreciate your assessment of this worksheet–before I set out to write 200 more of them.
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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