As it is in sufficiently active use in the lexicons of most educated people, I worked up this context clues worksheet on the noun wherewithal for use in the high school classroom. For an abstract noun, it has always struck me as surprisingly sturdy word.
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.
In response to a request from a student, I worked up this reading on Shakespeare’s 18th Sonnet and this vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet to accompany it. If you’re not familiar with this, one of the famous poems of all time, it begins with the line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
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.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States; this holiday, to me at least, given the political and cultural atmosphere in this country, feels especially important this year. If you ever feel a need to do something to make the world a more just place, today is the day to take action. As soon as the temperature rises to its balmy high of six degrees here in Springfield, Massachusetts, I’ll make the two-block trek to the Salvation Army Donation Center to deliver a couple of bags of things I can with which I can afford to part.
To celebrate the day, here is a reading on Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and a vocabulary building and comprehension worksheet to attend it. As a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Justice Marshall did the work to bring about Dr. King’s version of a just society for all, regardless of skin color, in the United States. While he argued a number of significant cases that led to ethnic justice, his crowning achievement by most standards must be his triumph in the Kansas desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.
If you find these materials useful, let me remind you that at this point in January, we are on the eve of Black History Month 2019. Mark’s Text Terminal will feature a full month of posts on Black History–as it does every year.
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.
Students everywhere, I expect, are thoroughly assimilated into digital culture and not especially interested in its origins and folklore–of which, as it turns out, there is a great deal. Take, for example, Charles Babbage. Babbage was a nineteenth-century polymath who is arguably the father of the computer. The amount of human error involved in mathematical work troubled Babbage, so he set out to invent the difference engine, a steam powered mechanical computer engineered to produce error-free mathematical tabulations.
Babbage’s invention has fascinated people since its inception, and unless I miss my guess, you will see in the course of your teaching career at least a few students interested in the history of computer technology. If so, then this reading on Charles Babbage and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it should serve as a short but thorough introduction to this obscure but important and fascinating historical figure.
If your students are up to and for it, you might also consider putting William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s (they are, incidentally, the progenitors of cyberpunk) work of alternate history and speculative fiction, The Difference Engine, in front of them. I like Gibson’s early work (his Neuromancer is a defining text of the cyberpunk genre, and a masterpiece in any case), don’t know much about Sterling, but found the novel fascinating.
Addendum: Please see the comments below from my esteemed high school chum Terry on the role of Ada Lovelace in creating the “software” to make Babbage’s engine actually perform more than basic mathematical tasks.
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.
These five worksheets on the homophones lead and led are not exactly the most cogent ever to issue from my pen. They do stand on their own, I think, and with some tinkering (which I may get to in the future, and since these are in Microsoft Word and can be manipulated, you can get to whenever you see fit) they might increase in cogency and therefore effectiveness.
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.
There are several places along the continuum of English Language Arts instruction, I would think, where this Cultural Literacy worksheet on allusion could come in handy.
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.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the noun teetotaler; there is probably an argument to be made to teaching this word to high schoolers, though the reasons, for me late on a Friday afternoon, look in my mind’s eye like pretty thin gruel. I haven’t worked with many students interested in the concept teetotaler and the lifestyle it represents.
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 complete lesson plan on using coordinating conjunctions. I open this exercise with this homophone worksheet on the homophones desert and dessert; while I realize that these two words, properly pronounced, aren’t really homophones, these are nonetheless words that students (and adults for that matter) frequently confuse, so I think it’s worth taking a moment to help them sort out these two words. Should this lesson stumble into another day for any reason, here is an everyday edit on Ludwig van Beethoven–and if you like Everyday Edit worksheets, the generous people at Education World have a yearlong supply of them posted as giveaways.
This structured worksheet of modified cloze exercises is the mainstay of this lesson; here too (contrived for the teacher’s ease of use) is the the teacher’s copy and answer key for the 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.
Because I got stuck on the word as an undergraduate (which in turn–getting stuck, that is–happened because I have a hamster wheel for a mind), when it turned up in several things I was reading for a couple of different history courses, I couldn’t resist to compose this context clues worksheet on the noun satrap. For the record, its primary meaning is the governor of a province in ancient Persia. But it can also mean ruler, subordinate official, and, weirdly, henchman.
Can you hear the dialogue in a pulp novel? “Louie! Rocco! Get on the horn and find us some satraps for the bank job.”
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.
Let’s begin this morning with this reading on Louis XIV, the Sun King, and add the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it. Remember that this is a key figure in European history, if only as an exemplar of the absurdity and excess of absolute monarchy, particularly as this self-serving, greedy, vain, and arrogant sovereign practiced it.
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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