Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “If the shoe fits, wear it.” This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension question. A solid explanation of this once-common idiom (if not still?) in English.
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.
“Corruption (noun): Change of an unfamiliar term or form to one more familiar, or departure form correct of standard word use; debased or unorthodox word form; perverted wording of a text or document. Adjective: corrupt; verb. Also BASTARDIZATION
‘His voice was polite again; he even chuckled. ‘After the first shock of seeing the Scrolls destroyed, we realized you’d actually given us a unique opportunity. All the texts are corrupt, you know, even these—copies of copies of copies, full of errata and lacunae—but we never could agree on a common reading, and of course the old Scrolls acquired a great spurious authority for sentimental reasons, even thought the contradict each other and themselves.’ John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
This week’s Text is this lesson plan on the Greek word roots -cracy and -crat, which mean government, rule, and power. I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the verb administer, which I hope, perhaps naively or erroneously, points the way toward the meaning of these two very productive roots. We get aristocracy, democrat, meritocracy, and bureaucracy from these roots; all are included on this scaffolded worksheet, which is the gravamen of the lesson
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.
OK, for the final documents post of Women’s History Month 2025, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Carry Nation, the once-famous temperance crusader. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and two 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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences, the first a bit long, and three comprehension questions.
Incidentally, the reading on this document terminates with the imperative to “See Seneca Falls Convention” in parentheses. You’ll find a Cultural Literacy worksheet on that event here.
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.
For the fourth and final Friday of Women’s History Month 2025, here is a reading on Edith Wharton with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
And that is it for Women’s History Month for 2025.
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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Eleanor Roosevelt. This a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences–all of them elegantly simple, single-clause sentences–and three comprehension questions. Just the basics, and if you need more, search “Eleanor Roosevelt” from the home page.
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, against my better judgment, is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Ayn Rand. This is a full-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences–beware the first of them, a doozy of a compound that I am convinced would best be revised and shortened for struggling and emergent readers–and four comprehension questions.
Why “against my better judgment”? I suppose because I find Ayn Rand’s (born in Russia as Alisa Zinoyevna Rosenbaum) “objectivist” philosophy to be little more than a simple minded rationale, dressed up in the most tawdry, yet soaring, rhetoric, for the worst kind of selfishness.
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.
“Sarah Barnwell Elliott: (1848-1928) American writer and feminist activist. Elliott was one of the “local color” (or regionalist) writers, and is best known for her novel Jerry (1891). Her most powerful fiction represents the displaced slave-owning class into which she was born, as it confronts hard economic times and a new social order. Elliott was a feminist activist in the South and led the fight for Tennessee to ratify the 19th amendment. Her fiction is often valued for its liberal attitudes toward women, as in The Making of Jane (1901). Her stories about race relations during Reconstruction are extremely problematic: the portraits of ex-slaves in An Incident, and Other Stories (1899) are both nostalgic and derogatory, and seem to contradict her family’s sense of noblesse oblige and well-known resistance to virulent racism. The title story is the first representation in American literature of a black man pursued by a lynch mob for raping a white woman. Elliott’s work raises questions about the attitudes toward race among Southern white women and the roles they played in reestablishing white supremacy in the postbellum South.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
For the third week of Women’s History Month 2025, here is a reading on Dorothea Lange along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you have any students interested in photography, particularly the history of the medium, this material on Dorothea Lange, who was a contemporary and friend of Ansel Adams, should do the trick.
If you want to dig deeper–or your student does–here is a series of eleven worksheets on famous photographers, along with a twelfth on Gordon Parks that is anything but an afterthought–indeed, it was the first of these I prepared.
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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