It was one of the Words of the Day I marked down when I was out for a short vacation last week, and it’s a good word used regularly in conversational English, so here is context clues worksheet on the noun heyday if you can use 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.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, and it is, I think you’ll agree, a strong abstract noun for our time. Therefore, I wrote this context clues worksheet on the noun bunkum. It means “insincere or foolish talk” and “nonsense.” The context clues I provided are relatively solid, if a bit trite.
This word was a favorite of legendary iconoclastic newspaperman H.L. Mencken; indeed, a posthumous collection of Mencken’s is titled A Carnival of Buncombe. That spelling of the word, incidentally, indicates its etymology, which is a circuitous tale involving Buncombe County, North Carolina, and Felix Walker, the United States Representative who served the district from 1816 to 1822.
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’m catching up on the last several Words of the Day from Merriam-Webster, so here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective docile. This modifier is in common enough use, I submit, to warrant its teaching to high school students–if not earlier.
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, and because I’m sure I encountered student confusion over its use in a social studies textbook at some point, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective impregnable.
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 plaudit. It’s not a commonly used word, but it is a strong noun. I think it might be worth asking students, via Socratic questioning, to make the connection with applaud, a strong verb used both intransitively and transitively.
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 can’t imagine any reason I need to stress the importance of an understanding of and an ability to use these words, now more than ever, I’ll post this context clues worksheet on the noun epidemic and this one on the noun pandemic without editorial comment.
However, a note on usage on epidemic and pandemic seems de rigueur. Differentiating the use of these two nouns is as easy as understanding their Greek roots: epi means on, upon, outside, over, among, at, after, to, and can best be understood, as some of those prepositions connote, as local; pan (along with panto) simply means all, and can best be understood, in our current circumstances, as meaning everywhere, as all connotes.
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 I must, I’ll stipulate that because it is not necessarily a word high schoolers must know before they graduate, this context clues on the adjective and adverb asunder, which was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the day a few days back.
Yet, if students want, at some point in their lives, to do something like write their own wedding vows (or understand vows another person wrote for them), then it might be good to have this word at hand.
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 simple one, to wit a pair of context clues worksheets. The first is a worksheet on the noun antagonist and the second is another on the verb antagonize, which is used only transitively. These are a couple of words students need to know and use across the curriculum.
I bid godspeed to those of you who have returned or will soon be returning to school, be it in a physical or virtual classroom. Stay safe, and teach your students well.
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, I’ve set out several times to write a context clues worksheet for the noun forte, and then never finished. So when it popped up as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day a few days back, I resolved to finally complete what should be a fairly mundane task. After all, forte is in fairly common use, isn’t it?
So I’m not sure why I heretofore struggled with writing this context clues worksheet on the noun forte. It means “one’s strong point” for the purposes of this worksheet and it’s the only way I use it in speech. But it has other meanings, including, as a noun, “the part of a sword or foil blade that is between the middle and the hilt and that is the strongest part of the blade.” Also as a noun, in the context of music, it means “a tone or passage played forte : a musical tone or passage played loudly.” So it is subtly polysemous.
I’ve always pronounced it “for-tay.” But there is contention about that. I’ll spare you the details, other than the topic sentence from a lengthy excursus from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, on pronouncing forte: “In forte we have a word derived from French that in its ‘strong point’ sense has no entirely satisfactory pronunciation.”
Whatever the case, this is a word educated people use in discourse, so our students should learn it for that reason alone.
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.
Several years ago, an old friend of mine enrolled her middle-school-aged son in a prestigious private school in Connecticut. One afternoon she mentioned in passing that she struggled to help him get through his Latin homework.
Latin homework for a middle-school student?!?
In fact, as I started to think about this, an experience from my own education suddenly made sense. As an undergraduate in the Five College Consortium, I studied the Russian language in one of the colleges in that system. I’d had a year of Spanish in high school and learned a functional version of the language in my travels through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. So I understood gendered nouns and conjugating verbs, though I was no expert at the latter.
Russian, however, was the first heavily inflected language I’d encountered. I really did struggle with oblique cases and all the rules that governed them and the usage rules they themselves governed. My fellow students appeared at ease with Russian. When I gave some thought to my friend’s son studying Latin, it suddenly occurred to me: my fellow Russian students almost certainly gained their understanding of the inflected structure of Russian because they had studied Latin–either in middle or high school.
It so happened that I began using Latin and Greek word roots–with which the English language is relatively rife–for vocabulary building early on in my teaching career. Because many of my students spoke Spanish as their first language, Latin was inevitably a bridge to English for them, and they figured that out quite quickly. They also figured out that as a rule, Latin is offered in in some of the best high schools in the United States, so there was, even in the limited way they were learning it with me, some status and prestige in learning the lingua franca of the Roman empire.
So I figured that if Latin was good enough for students at Phillips Exeter, it was good enough for the inner-city kids under my tutelage. Over the years, I’ve developed a number of materials on Latin and Latinisms (if you search those two terms on this blog, you’ll find a plethora of materials) for use in my classroom.
So when it was the word of the day a few days back at Merriam-Webster, I let if go by at first; but within a few hours, I’d worked up this worksheet on the Latin noun ne plus ultra. It means, as I think the comparatively strong context in its sentences indicate, “the highest point to be attained.” Will our students ever use this noun in conversation? Not very likely. Will they encounter this word in academic or scholarly prose? There is at least a chance of that. Will this worksheet school them in an analytical reading method? My experience is, in using context clues worksheets for years, that it will. Will kids think it cool to possess this piece of arcane knowledge? In my experience some if not most do.
So that’s the reason for this post.
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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