If you teach any topic in social studies, you might find this context clues on the adjective populous useful.
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 series of worksheets related to the the Greek word root pro. I’d originally planned to post these about a month ago, but I became embroiled in a controversy of my own invention over this root, which I had always understood as Latin in origin, as it forms the basis of so many Latin words. The word root dictionary I use for this kind of work, Roger S. Crutchfield’s English Vocabulary Quick Reference: A Comprehensive Dictionary Arranged by Word Roots (Leesburg, VA: Lexadyne Publishing, 2009) lists pro as a Greek root, even though it forms the basis of so many Latin words.
Because I’m not a linguist, but rather a special education teacher in a high school, I struggled with this. In the final analysis, I’ve decided, pro is a Greek root that found its way into Latin–and means essentially the same thing in both languages, which is before, forward, forth, in place of, and in addition to. Crutchfield’s dictionary breaks down some of these words in their Greek and Latin parts. One word on the worksheet below, pro bono, is Latin, but, again, proceeds (proceeds, as Crutchfield breaks it down, is all Greek) from the Greek root pro.
So, that said, here is a word root worksheet on the Greek word root pro for this week’s Text. In addition, to complement the word root worksheet, here are three context clues worksheets on the verb proceed, the noun procedure, and the noun protagonist.
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.
By high school, students should understand the difference between poetry and prose. Here is a context clues on the noun prose that might guide your students toward understanding the distinction.
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.
Maybe you can use this context clue on the verb pursue which is used mostly transitively, but also has a relatively narrow intransitive use–i.e. “to go in pursuit.”
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 context clues worksheet on the verb realize, which is transitive only; when I saw that in the dictionary, I realized that the direct object that follows this verb must about always be a noun phrase beginning with that (or maybe a pronoun in the nominative case, even though that pronoun is usually preceded by that), so that may be one thing you want to emphasize when you teach this 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.
It’s hard to imagine, in teaching social studies, a time in history when the term Sphere of Influence isn’t germane (or at least starting with Rome, but I would argue that the earlier empires in the near east also claimed spheres of influence). So, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun phrase sphere of influence that might help elucidate this phrase for students.
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 morning, after carrying them around in a Moleskine for a couple of weeks, I finally typed up these five homophone worksheets on the adjective idle and the noun idol. I considered including idle as a verb, but decided for the moment to keep these simple. There are any number of ways to bring the verb into this mix, including a context clues worksheet to follow these. If there’s interest in that (leave a comment, please), then I’ll write a context clues worksheet for idle as a verb and append it to this post.
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.
By high school, teachers hope, students have mastered the form of the grammatically complete sentence, even if those sentences are only passingly meaningful. Where there is structure, one can assume, there can be style. High school is the place, I think, where those well-structured sentences can gain meaning and be forged into longer forms of writing, particularly the essay. At the school in which I serve, teachers assign students multiple essay assignments, and the midterms, finals, and especially the New York State Regents Examinations in humanities subjects all require students to compose essays.
And all of this takes place, as far as I can tell, in an instructional environment in which students are never really told, with any appreciable degree of clarity or completeness, what exactly it is that makes an essay. This is difficult enough for students for whom school work comes naturally; for students who struggle, this is arguably educational malpractice.
So, this year, I finally began work on an essay-writing unit that begins with an elucidation of the essay as a form of writing, and continues with a series of short, two-lesson unit that seeks to introduce students to the essay and assist them in developing their own understanding of the this “most flexible and adaptable of all literary forms,” in the words of J.A. Cuddon, the author of The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (New York: Penguin, 1992).
In the first lesson, which is this week’s Text, I guide students through this vocabulary building worksheet with six words related to essay (to wit: essay as a verb, essay as a noun twice, the adjective essayistic, the noun essayist, and the compound noun essay question). As with all of these kinds of context clues worksheets, I assign a class linguist (for more on the procedures you might consider using for this worksheet see the About Weekly Texts page above the picture at the top of the page, and find your way to the Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual), who will need the lexicon that provides the dictionary definitions of these words.
One thing I am particularly interested in when using this worksheet–and as of this writing, I’ve used these materials three times, but each time they worked well with my students–is if students can make the connotative connections between the three definitions of the word essay included in this worksheet. As a verb, essay means attempt or trial (which is what the French word whence it comes, essai, means), and one of its meanings as a noun is the result or product of an attempt. The third meaning, of course, is the one students must most clearly understand, an analytic or interpretive literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view or something resembling such a composition <a photographic ~>. Can students see their essays as both an attempt at making sense of a topic, and as the outcome of that attempt? For struggling learners, this small act of semantic synthesis may well represent some fairly deep learning.
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.
If you are an English Language Arts teacher, you might find useful this context clues on the noun memoir.
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.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a better time in the history of our republic to introduce the social studies concept of totalitarianism. To that end, you may find this context clues worksheet on the adjective totalitarian useful.
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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