Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun euphemism, which I think high school students, particularly in the media environment which we currently occupy, really ought to know and be able to use.
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 reading on Babe Ruth and the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. Not much to say about this other than it tends to be high-interest material.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on fractals for math teachers and students alike.
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, on a cool Saturday morning in July, are five worksheets on the homophones you’re and your. These are two words frequently confused.
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, if you can use it, is a context clues worksheet on the adjective prolific. This is a word that comes up quite a bit in casual discourse, particularly in connection with the production of artists, writers, and musicians.
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 doubt it’s a word that comes up much in any teacher’s classroom, I nonetheless wrote this context clues worksheet on the noun polymath. Because polymath is basically synonymous with Renaissance man, it seems like a word high school students ought to know to understand this important intellectual and cultural dimension of the Renaissance.
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 Friday again: this week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on the Latin word root agri. It means, crop, production, and field. I begin this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun farmer. And, last, this worksheet on the Latin root agri is the mainstay of this lesson. Nota bene, please, that I have previously posted this worksheet by itself without a lesson plan or accompanying short exercise.
That’s it. I don’t know about where you are, but it has been very hot here. If you live or work in New York City and environs, I hope you’re staying cool.
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.
This is the one-thousandth post on Mark’s Text Terminal, a milestone I didn’t think I would reach until the end of this year. I’ve been trying to figure out how to “celebrate” this, but have decided that I won’t. It took almost three years to publish this many posts. I imagine I’ll keep this blog going for awhile; at the moment, it’s one of the key sources of professional satisfaction for me, which matters.
Anyway, I offer today something I started working on about three years ago, but never really made any progress on developing. In the autumn of 2015 I was summoned to jury duty in my borough. I’ll spare you the details other than to say it was a particularly tragic case involving the murder of a child. While waiting in the jury room for what seemed like interminable periods of time, I worked on a variety of things. Along the way, I read David Crystal’s book on what was then a favored mode of communication among my students. That book was Txting: the Gr8 Db8 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
One of my obsessions as a teacher is helping students become proficient writers. I saw in Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 the possibility of helping students develop their own understanding of the various registers in which people use language, how proper English usage works, to introduce them to the field of linguistics, and to demonstrate while texting language is perfectly appropriate for communication between social acquaintances and intimates, it is inappropriate for other kinds of communication and correspondence. At issue, in Mr. Crystal’s view, is whether or not “textese” is a language . Starting from the basic laws of linguistics, he says yes, it is. I’m not so much interested in that question per se as much as the answers it yields and their implications for proper and clear usage. The essential question for this unit (which, alas, is not on the overarching unit plan, is this: What are the characteristics of a language, and does “textese” feature them? If so, how?
So I began compiling this aggregated text sheet from the book for use in developing worksheets and learning supports. I also started outlining a unit plan to use with this material. And, finally, I started this lesson plan template. And that, esteemed reader, is as far as I got with it. In the meantime, the students in the school in which I serve took a step down–in my opinion–in terms of compositional sophistication and began communicating via Instagram and Snapchat, which rely, I gather, on images rather than text.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. I rather doubt I will take this work any further, so after I post it here, I will remove it from my computer. However, if you develop this further, I would be grateful indeed if you would let me know where you took it. 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 the using the interrogative pronoun. I start this lesson with this homophone worksheet on the contraction you’re and the possessive pronoun your. If for some reason (and there are often plenty of reasons for this) the lesson goes into a second day, I like to keep nearby this Cultural Literacy worksheet on plagiarism, which I use with other lessons as well (I find one cannot emphasize the issue of plagiarism enough). The center of this lesson this scaffolded worksheet on using the interrogative pronoun. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of 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.
Over the years, and with several readings of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design and related books, I have finally managed to din into my own head the importance of teaching students conceptual knowledge that transfers within a domain, and even across domains. I’ve come to think that teachers, whatever their subject and grade level, are in the business of reifying.
Here are two context clues worksheets on the verb reify and the noun reification. They are words, I am increasingly convinced, that students should learn as soon as it is developmentally appropriate. If nothing else, these words will help students understand that there are two basic cognitive categories, the abstract and the concrete. These two words may well help instantiate the difference between concrete and abstract nouns, something I find students with low level of literacy struggle to distinguish–and something that definitely gets in the way of learning on a broader scale.
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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