Here is a worksheet on the Latin word root aqua. Do I need to tell you it means water? It is an extremely productive root in English as well as the all the Romance languages.
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.
From Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on the arrival and growth of teeth. You’ll need the reading with comprehension questions to complete this short reading and writing exercise, which, like all 50 of these lessons that I will eventually post here, is intended to help struggling learners experience mastery and therefore build self-confidence and competence in school.
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.
For the bulk of my teaching career thus far, I worked at a economics-and-finance-themed high school in Lower Manhattan. Students, naturally, sat for a required course in entrepreneurship. One of the expectations of that class was that students would come up with an idea for a business, then draft a business plan. The teachers for this course were excellent. One student won a national competition and was honored with a visit to President Obama in the Oval Office.
Many of the students I served struggled with beginning their work for this course. I wrote up this reading on the Slinky, a favorite childhood toy of people of a certain age, and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I wanted students to understand that sometimes inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs stumble into ideas, and that students could pretty easily do the same–but they should not miss the opportunities of this kind of stumbling presents–often unclearly.
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.
“homonymic clash: A clash between two homonyms, either of which could be used in similar contexts. A classic example is a posited clash in parts of southwest France between a word gat ‘cat’ derived from Latin cattus, and an identical form gat ‘cock,’ predicted by regular processes of sound change from Latin gallus. In fact, the second was replaced by other forms that changed or extended their meaning: faisan, historically ‘pheasant,’ vicaire ‘curate,’ and others. The explanation, proposed by Gillieron, is that these replacements avoided the misunderstandings that the clash would often have caused.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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.
Here’s another word students, I submit, should know now, so I therefore submit, also, this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the concept of a faction. Given the extent to which politics in the United States, has become factionalized (I’m talking to you, Qanon nutcases, among others), and the fact that the federal government in this nation is arguably in the hands of a faction, it is imperative that students understand this word and the concept it represents.
Fortunately, the definition is strong and objective at the same time.
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.
“Apt for Likely. ‘One is apt to be mistaken.’ Apt means facile, felicitous, ready, and the like; but even the dictionary-makers cannot persuade a person of discriminating taste to accept it as a synonymous with likely.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
Here is an English usage worksheet on differentiating between the use of stance and stand. It is, as are the others from this series I currently labor to build, pretty straightforward. If you want to know more about the rationale for this group of documents, please see the About Texts & Texts page on this website. Long story short: I contrived these to meet an English Language Arts Common Core Standard.
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.
“Nonrestrictive Modifier: A phrase or clause that does not limit or restrict the essential meaning of the element it modifies. My youngest niece, who lives in Ann Arbor, is a magazine editor.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Last but not least, today, here is a short worksheet on the Greek word root ornith/o, which means, of course, bird. If you’ve downloaded other word-root worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, please be advised that this one is a much shorter exercise. Its purpose is as a do-now exercise, something short to start off a class period.
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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