“Usage: The way in which the elements of language are customarily used to produce meaning, including accent, pronunciation, words, and idioms. The term occurs neutrally in formal usage, disputed usage, and local usage, and it has strong judgmental and prescriptive connotations in bad usage, correct usage, usage and abusage, and usage controversies.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
OK, I think this lesson plan on using the simple present tense of verbs speaks for itself and therefore doesn’t require much comment.
I open this lesson with this worksheet on the homophones who’s and whose. These two words (well, a contraction and a word) are quite easily confused, so the explanation for their use is extensive. Students will walk away, after completing this, with a page from a grammar and usage manual. In the event the lesson goes into a second day, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the term and concept expletive.
This scaffolded worksheet is the centerpiece of this unit for students. You might need this word bank to support completion of the worksheet. Finally, here is the teachers’ copy of the worksheet to make getting through the lesson a little easier for you.
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 ten years, I worked in a school in Lower Manhattan that assigned synthetic research papers to students who lacked basic writing skills. And that issue was one of many at that school where writing assignments were concerned. Over the years, I fabricated a lot of learning supports on the fly, including this sample outline and these structured outlining blanks.
At one point, in the social studies classes I co-taught, students were required to submit outlines in the run-up to writing their actual paper. I suspect I prepared the documents in this post to support students in drafting their outlines. At least that’s what these supports look like to me. Of course, you can use them however you see fit. As always, these documents are in Microsoft Word, so they can be manipulated for your students and circumstances.
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.
“Imperative: Indicating explicit request, supplication, prohibition, warning, command, etc., e.g., ‘Stop!’ ‘Do let’s be serious.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
When I co-taught global studies classes in New York City, the fact that the deeper conceptual processes of history were ignored in favor of a pedagogy of discrete, decontextualized facts greatly troubled me. This was a particular problem–and I am confident it remains so, particularly in the classroom in which I served during the final two years of my tenure in New York–in teaching the French Revolution and its animating intellectual ideology, the Enlightenment. Students in the classroom I shared could walk away from the unit on this period with absolutely no sense of the enormity of its epochal influence. Therefore, they could not understand that in many respects, the world, especially the Western world, continues to argue over and contest the legacy of the Enlightenment.
In an attempt to convey the significance of the Enlightenment in my own classroom, I started with these two context clues worksheets on the verb enlighten and the noun enlightenment. The verb, incidentally, is only used transitively.
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.
When I left Vermont in August of 1996 to seek my fortune as a doctoral candidate in history, I intended to return posthaste–if not to Vermont, than as near to the state as possible. Last August (of 2019) I finally made it back here to work in a public school system. I’d visited every summer for many years, but as I learned slowly and the hard way (like the way I learn everything in my life, alas), living in a place is quite a bit different than visiting it.
Of course I was aware of the opioid crisis in the state–it has been national news–and a national problem, after all–but I hadn’t had a chance to see it up close.
Now I have, and I can tell you that in the 23 years I was away, opioids cut a wide swath through the social and economic fabric of this fine state. So, for any young person who thinks that trying opioids won’t necessarily lead to personal disaster, here is a reading on morphine along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension 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.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Congress of Vienna for you social studies teachers. This is one of those key events in global history that I imagine every history teacher must deal with at some point in the curriculum.
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.
Moving right along on this sunny spring morning, here is a lesson plan on Aesop’s fable “The Boasting Traveler” and its reading and comprehension questions worksheet. There’s not much to say about this or any of the other short lessons on this blog based on Aesop’s Fables other than I wrote them for a younger group of students than I have generally taught over the course of my career as a public school teacher.
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.
“Genitive: Indicating close and exclusive relationship, as by denoting possession, a characteristic or trait, or source, e.g., ‘the building’s shadow,’ ‘the woman’s touch.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Here is an English usage worksheet on the complications of using the words affect and effect, both as verbs and nouns.
As a verb, affect is used both intransitively and transitively; its use is complicated by the fact that this verb can have two meanings. Effect as a verb also carries complicated usage rules which are mitigated by the fact that it only is used transitively.
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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