Tag Archives: building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge

Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun circumstance. This word is used mostly in the plural, and I’ve written the context clues to reflect that. Nonetheless, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition (the dictionary of record at Mark’s Text Terminal), lists it in the singular, which is how I too list 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.

Given that it’s the emotion that many struggling learners feel at school, this context clues worksheet on the noun misery should be useful, if nothing else, in helping students match concept with reality, or theory with practice, if you will. Actually, it will also help them develop the fundamental reading skill of identifying words from context in prose.

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 I needed one recently to help students with a reading assignment in global studies, I wrote this context clues worksheet on the verb exacerbate. This verb is only used transitively, so don’t forget your direct object. Generally speaking, you must exacerbate something: the clogged toilet, the mess in the kitchen, the irritation of your spouse.

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’s a context clues worksheet on en route. Merriam-Webster says it can be used as both an adjective and an adverb, but I’ve only used it as an adverb, and I cannot, off the top of my head, think of how it might be used as an attributive adjective (The en route barbarian checked his iron-age technology, maybe?), though it makes sense (I am en route) as a predicate. It’s probably worth taking a look a this definition from Merriam-Webster’s website, which provides a couple of useful definitions, as well as noting that en route, in terms of popularity, is in the top ten percent of words.

So it’s worth teaching to our students, at the very least, by the time they graduate from high school.

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.

Because I work in a high school, it is my burden to spend my days listening to teenagers tease and otherwise disrespect one another with barnyard epithets, including the dreaded “N-word.” I’ve long considered designing and teaching an English Language Arts unit on insults–if for no other reason to elevate the discourse even minutely among the students in this school.

To that end, I wrote this context clues worksheet on the noun creep yesterday. Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate (the dictionary of record, so to speak, here at Mark’s Text Terminal) defines it, for the purposes of the context I’ve used here, as “an unpleasant or obnoxious person.”

A timely word, then.

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.