Here is a short Cultural Literacy exercise on understatement. I use these to get class periods started, as well as to help those students who struggle with transitions between classes to settle themselves and focus on the work 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.
Of all the units on using the parts of speech I’ve built, the fifth, on pronouns, is the longest and most involved of the whole yearlong course of study. As both an undergraduate and a graduate student, I worked in college writing centers. The two most common writing errors that impelled professors to send students to the writing center were pronoun-antecedent agreement errors and subject-verb agreement faults. Consequently, I have taken particular pains in building training around these two writing issues into the worksheets in my pronoun and verb units.
This week’s Text is a complete introductory lesson plan on the personal pronoun. This lesson begins, depending on how you use it, and with which population, with an Everyday Edit worksheet on Pocahontas (and, incidentally, if you like Everyday Edits, the good people at Education World very generously give them away; if you click that hyperlink, it will take you to the page where they keep the answer keys). If the lesson runs into a second day, then here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on satire that should serve well as your second do-now exercise. The center of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using the personal pronouns in all three cases. Students will very likely benefit from using this learning support on pronouns and case. Finally, to help you guide your students through this lesson, 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.
After posting nine weeks of readings for Black History Month and Women’s History Month, I’m pleased to offer, as this week’s Text, a complete lesson plan on descriptive and limiting adjectives. As with most of the lessons I write, there are two short do-now exercises to begin this lesson: the first is a parsing sentences worksheet for verbs and the second is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on idiom. The mainstay of this lesson is a scaffolded worksheet on descriptive and limiting adjectives. If your students are anything like those I serve, then you will very likely find useful this learning support which you might want to edit or otherwise rearrange. Finally, to help you guide your students through this lesson, 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.
We’ve just passed through a week of Regents Tests here in New York, a round of high stakes tests that decide the status of a student’s diploma. I always find this a depressing exercise, because it penalizes perfectly able kids who don’t test well. Perhaps one day we’ll live in a society that educates students as they are (or how they are–poorly written IEPs notwithstanding)–and builds on that–rather than a theoretical “where they should be.”
This week’s Text is a lesson on numerical adjectives. Because this lesson is at about the halfway point in my adjectives unit, I begin it with this do now-exercise on parsing sentences to find adjectives. If the lesson runs into a second day for all the reasons that some lessons do when presented to struggling learners, then you may also need this Cultural Literacy worksheet on carpe diem. The mainstay of the lesson is a scaffolded worksheet on numerical adjectives that begins with modified cloze exercises and concludes with independent practice using numerical adjectives in grammatically complete declarative sentences. You might also find the teachers’ copy/answer key useful.
Because I teach English Language Arts and social studies to the same group of students, I teach the concept of cardinal numbers (the counting numbers like one, two, three, etc.) and ordinal numbers (those numbers we use to order or rank things, as in first, second, third, etc.) in a lesson about historical dates and understanding how to understand the ordinally numbered centuries. I call on the prior knowledge from that global studies lesson for this one on numerical adjectives; both cardinal and ordinal numbers are used as adjectives. Ten days to two weeks separate the presentation of these two lessons, so the timing allows me a chance to assess students’ memories and capacity for retention.
This is also an important concept in grammar for students to understand. When I took Russian as an older undergraduate, I had to go back and study the difference between these two types of numbers and their use. If your students need help in understanding the meaning of these terms and the concepts they represent, then here’s a context clues worksheet on the term cardinal numbers and another on the adjective ordinal.
That’s it. Next week begins Black History Month, followed in March by Women’s History Month. I’ll post plenty of readings for both.
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.
It’s Friday the thirteenth, and time for another Weekly Text. I’ve begun revising my unit on adverbs, so this week, I offer you a lesson plan that introduces students to adverbs.
Like most if not all of the lessons I post here, I’ve prepared this one to take place over two days, given the contingencies of attention issues, disruptive behavior, and the like. So, there are two do-now exercises to open this lesson: the first is this do-now Cultural Literacy Worksheet on run-on sentences; the second is a context clues worksheet on the adjective superlative. (It’s worth mentioning in passing that this word is also used to describe the utmost degree of adjectives; some time ago I posted the introductory lesson of my adjectives unit, and over time I’ll post the entire unit, one lesson of which covers the degrees–synthetic, comparative, and superlative–of adjectives, so this do-now exercise might also serve you well in that capacity.)
The mainstay of the lesson is a scaffolded worksheet on understanding adverbs and their use. I imagine you will find the teachers’copy/answer key for the worksheet.
That’s it until next week.
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.
We hosted parent-teacher conferences last evening, which means we were here until almost eight o’clock. Long day, to put it succinctly if in agrammatical style.
A couple of hundred years ago, when I was studying Russian in college, I fell into confusion when my professor introduced the accusative case; nouns used as direct objects in Russian are inflected differently–there are five oblique cases–i.e. cases other than the nominative in Russian–than they are as subjects. For example, kniga, the word for book, becomes knigu when it is the direct object of a verb, as in “I am reading a book.” My ignorance at that moment felt legion to me (I was in my early thirties as an undergraduate). Discovering that I didn’t understand the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs only exacerbated the extent of my ignorance.
Students in high school really ought to know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs for a variety of reasons, and studying inflected languages is certainly one of them. For that reason, this week’s Text is two Cultural Literacy worksheets on transitive and intransitive verbs. These are short exercises that I use at the beginning of lessons on recognizing these verbs and understanding how to use them.
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 have become convinced of the utility of teaching the parts of speech in order to build literacy in general, and in particular to assist students in developing their own understanding of how to write grammatically complete, syntactically meaningful, and stylish sentences. To that end, I have developed units for each of the parts of speech, and these constitute an almost-year-long cycle of English Language Arts instruction.
So, this weeks text is the first lesson of the first unit of this cycle, on nouns. This lesson calls upon students to use this teacher-authored reading passage to identify all the nouns in it; as you will see, this is a three-part scaffold that asks students to read, then apply their understanding of nouns, first in modified cloze exercises, then in writing sentences from subject to period. The lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy do-now exercise on syntax. You might also find useful this singular and plural nouns formation review
You’ll notice that the plan for this lesson doesn’t list the standards met. Because of the way I manage my work flow, I list all the standards on the overarching unit plan. (That way if I must print a lesson plan to appease a bureaucrat, I don’t burn too much ink.) For that reason, I have posted typescript copies of the Common Core Standards I use in my practice in the About Weekly Texts page that is above the banner photo on the home page for this site. They are in the penultimate paragraph there.
22 September 2016, Post Scriptum: I have just updated the singular and plural nouns formation review worksheet linked to above.
15 July 2022, Post Scriptum: I have revised the work for this lesson. The reading and worksheet now contains a reading from The Fight (Boston, MacMillan, 1975), Norman Mailer’s account of the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in 1974; it follows then that the teacher’s copy of the worksheet received an update as 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.
While I was away in Vermont last month, I barely opened my computer and so skipped two Fridays, which is the day I have habitually posted my Weekly Texts. Ergo, another midweek Text to make up for those Fridays. First, here are two context clues worksheets on motive and motivation (both nouns) to help students understand these oft-used words in the English language. Then, because I work in a high school with an economics and finance theme, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the profit motive.
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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