Last, and quite possibly least, this morning is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Kharthoum. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of one sentence and one comprehension question. As I said: quite possibly least.
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.
OK, as long as we’re on the topic this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Joe Louis. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences and three comprehension questions. This is a more basic introduction to the Brown Bomber than the post just below.
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 third week of Black History Month 2025 here is a reading on 2pac and Biggie along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
At this point, this blog is heavily stocked with materials excerpted and adapted from David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim’s series of books under the title of The Intellectual Devotional. There are five in all of these books: the first one, simply called The Intellectual Devotional, then one volume each (under the title The Intellectual Devotional) on American History, Biographies, Health, and Modern Culture. All of this is a long way of explaining that some readings repeat, with only slight variations, in more than one volume of this series; there is, ergo, another version of this material on this blog that I published back in 2018.
It goes without saying that in some places, this will particularly high-interest material. Thus, I have tagged it as such.
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 George Washington Carver. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. I had learned, I suppose in elementary school, to associate George Washington Carver with developing a plethora of uses for the peanut; as it happens, he did the same thing with the sweet potato.
All of this was done, interestingly, because Carver recognized the deleterious toll cotton production takes on the soil. This makes him, as his Wikipedia page observes, an early leader in environmentalism.
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, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Namibia. This is a two-page (!) worksheet whose reading, somehow, in four sentences, manages to give a relatively thorough introduction to this African nation, including its colonial and post-colonial struggles. As you can imagine, these four sentences are relatively long and complex. If I were to give it to most of the students I have served over time, I would edit the reading to ease its understanding.
There are ten (again, !) comprehension questions that could easily be reduced by half. Indeed, many of the questions are there to test comprehension of fine details, in this case the African nations that border Namibia. In terms of content, it’s far from vital–unless you want to see how students track details in a relatively complex reading.
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 second month of Black History Month 2025, here is a reading on the Harlem Renaissance with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This is a useful, one-page survey of key events and personalities of the Harlem Renaissance. In the end, however, it is only an introduction to one of the most fertile and consequential periods in American cultural history.
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, New York City, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged art/architecture/design, black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, fiction/literature, poetry, readings/research, united states history
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Lake Victoria. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions on this significant African landmark.
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 Michael Jordan. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two long compound sentences–which may need shortening for emergent and struggling readers–and three comprehension questions. Once again, just the basics.
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.
Despite Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s diktat to cancel it for members of the United States Armed Forces, February remains Black History Month, and today begins its observance on Mark’s Text Terminal with this reading on the Scottsboro Boys along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
As a middle school student, I would often take extended bathroom breaks so that I could visit the library to look at Time Magazine’s year-by-year Time Capsule books, which fascinated me. It was in one of these volumes that I first became aware of the case of the Scottsboro Boys. Even in the bland prose of Time Magazine, and even to my then relatively unschooled mind, this was obviously one of the most grotesque miscarriages of justice ever perpetrated in a country that is at this point known for such things–especially where and when Black people are concerned.
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.
“Deprivation for Privation. ‘The mendicant showed the effects of deprivation.’ Deprivation refers to the act of depriving, taking away from; privation is the state of destitution, of not having.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
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