Alright, moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on slang. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. A basic but thorough introduction to this concept in linguistics.
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.
How’s your summer starting out? I’m retiring on 1 August. Enough said.
In the meantime, here is fourth lesson plan of the Introduction to Writing Sentences Unit, this one on writing the simple sentence. This lesson opens, in a rare feat of alignment at Mark’s Text Terminal, with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the simple sentence; this is half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. A solid introduction to this sentence structure, with students called upon to write a simple sentence of their own using a mentor text as a model.
And here is the scaffolded worksheet that is the centerpiece of this lesson; it asks students to try their own hands at composing simple sentences as a process for developing their own understanding of this form.
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.
Now seems like a good time to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the political doctrine of internationalism. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. A bare-bones but effective introduction to a concept that, were it ever to catch on with any permanence, might just make the world a better place.
Really.
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 sure it appears elsewhere on this blog, probably as part of a lesson, but since I have practically infinite storage space on this website, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the intransitive verb in grammar and usage. If nothing else, this will be a more easily searchable post and spare the reader the indignity and waste of time searching for it elsewhere.
This is a half-page worksheet with a four-sentence reading and three comprehension questions. Given the relatively abstract nature of the material, I think the editors of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, once again, have done an admirable reifying this concept and bringing it down to earth for younger learners.
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.
When I taught or co-taught global studies, it was a topic that the curricula, unlike the often superficial passes through other important historical processes, focused on at relatively inordinate length, so this Cultural Literacy on the concept of an indulgence, at three sentences and three questions on a half-page document, was insufficient.
Still, it opens the door to discuss this weird medieval financial instrument–swapping earthly gains (often obtained through exploitative and violent means) for heavenly salvation. As the reading observes, indulgences were one of the things that infuriated Martin Luther and therefore began The Reformation. They also demonstrate, should anyone care to take a discussion in this direction, the apparently bottomless human capacity for self-delusion, corruption, and folly.
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.
Alright, it’s time to roll up my sleeves and start preparing this long run of posts to publish as the entire Introduction to Writing Sentences unit.
So here is the first lesson plan on understanding the parts of speech as well as the elements of a sentence, that is the subject and the predicate. This lesson takes students through the process, first as a structured activity using mentor texts, then independent work, writing grammatically complete sentences with a recognition of their subjects and predicates.
Accordingly, I hope, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the parts of a sentence opens this lesson. This scaffolded worksheet is the primary work for this lesson, and guides students through the work, both supported and independent, of understanding the parts of sentence by actually working with them. This learning support attends the worksheet. More generally, here are a glossary on the parts of speech, which is adapted from William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (New York: Longman, 2000), that chestnut of composition classes everywhere at one time. Finally, here is a learning support on the verb to be, conjugated. The verb to be, known as a copula, is everywhere in the English language. It is vital that our students know how to conjugate this extremely common verb in English.
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.
As I prepared to publish this Cultural Literacy worksheet on hedonism, I found myself thinking that most high school students, most adolescents, do understand that the pursuit of pleasure and happiness is, if not the highest good in life, is close enough. I certainly did as a teenager. This short reading does a nice job connecting the concept of hedonism to the Epicureans.
In any case, this is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and three comprehension questions.
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.
If I had my druthers, I would teach five sections of rhetoric and composition every day until I retired. Readers of this blog, I am confident, understand that good writing instruction particularly interests me. Unfortunately, in 19 years of teaching, while I have seen plenty of writing assigned, I have never seen it explicitly taught. This has been, frankly, a source of a lot of bitter frustration for me. I do what I can, but it usually isn’t long before a functionally illiterate administrator shuts me down. The credo in the New York City Department of Education seems to be that if students haven’t learned diction, grammar, usage, and style by high school, they never will. How that squares with the amount of writing we nonetheless assign–which is often quite a bit–I have yet to determine.
Unfortunately, I am a special education teacher who must (as I have, again, frankly, needed to learn the hard way over and over) go along to get along. In my experience in the schools in which I have served, no one is particularly interested in anything I might have to say about teaching and learning.
Which doesn’t mean I can’t work at things anyway–that was really what drove the inception of this blog.
During the 2024-2025 school year, when I had a spare moment, I worked on a unit, Introduction to Writing Sentences, that I started during the pandemic. Now that unit is complete; the next 18 Weekly Texts will bring the whole thing to you.
If you’re a regular user of this blog, nota bene, please that some of these materials are parts of other units that I have very likely previously published. What I can tell you, I’d like to think, is that I improved many of the lessons per se, then thought long and hard, then worked long and hard, to get them into some kind of sequence. The material in this unit is more heavily supported, and includes some new learning supports.
This week’s Text, then, is everything out of the planning materials folder for this unit. Without further ado, then, here is the unit plan, the lesson plan template, and the worksheet template. This bibliography of writer’s manuals is probably something students, particularly college-bound students, ought to have. Likewise this lexicon of basic grammatical terms excerpted from from a classic, William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style (New York: Longman, 2000).
This learning support on using colons and semicolons is a general handout, like the lexicon above, to support students throughout this unit. So is this learning support on dependent and independent clauses. I’m not sure why it was in the planning materials folder for this unit, but here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the parts of speech (three sentences of text, which may require a bit of editing or adaptation for struggling readers, and three comprehension questions) that I assume I planned to use downstream on this unit.
Finally, if you need it, here is a lesson checklist that I use for a variety of purposes, including quality control and improvement over this body of work.
And that, esteemed reader, is the contents of the planning materials folder for the Introduction to Writing Sentences Unit. Now, for the next 17 weeks, Mark’s Text Terminal will offer all 17 lessons for your use.
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.
Finally, for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month 2026, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tiananmen Square. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading and one comprehension question.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tahiti. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences, the second of them a bit long, but not so long that students–even emerging and struggling readers–can’t make sense of it.
Even in two sentences, the reading mentions Tahiti’s allure to Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson, summoning both of them to the Island to create art extolling the its beauty.
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.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.