Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

Independent Practice: The Mauryan Empire

Here is an independent practice worksheet on the Mauryan Empire.

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.

Cultural Literacy: James Joyce

It’s hard to imagine there will be much demand even at the high school level for this Cultural Literacy worksheet on James Joyce. But who knows? More startling things have happened in my classrooms, to be sure.

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.

A Lesson Plan on the Latin Word Roots Deca, Dec, Deka, and Deci

Here is a lesson plan on the Latin word roots deca, dec, deka, and deci. The first three mean ten, but deci means tenth. As you have probably already inferred, especially you math teachers, this is a very productive root in English, and will lead students to understand a wide variety of words for transfer across the curriculum.

I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun cipher. This word root worksheet is the mainstay of this 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.

Term of Art: Substantive

“Substantive: Indicating a noun or a word or phrase functioning as a noun, e.g., ‘running away.’”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

A Lesson Plan on the Compound Noun

Alright, moving right along, here is a lesson plan on the compound noun and its use in declarative sentences. I open this lesson with the Everyday Edit worksheet on National Public Radio (and as I will never stop saying every time I post an Everyday Edit worksheet, the generous proprietors of Education World will let you walk away from their site with a yearlong supply of these worksheets free of charge). This scaffolded worksheet at the center of the lesson will take most of your time in helping students master this point of grammar and usage. I made this teacher’s copy of the worksheet to make sure I taught the material consistently. Finally, here is the learning support, a word bank, to help move the work along.

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.

A Lesson Plan on Historic Ages and Eras from The Order of Things

From the pages of Barbara Ann Kipfer’s The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on historic ages and eras along with its reading and comprehension worksheet. As I note in the “About Posts & Texts” page, these worksheets are something I began developing this year as short exercises to take advantage of teachable moments and to help students develop an understanding of working with two symbolic systems (i.e. words and numbers) at the same time.

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.

Homosexuality

When I started working with troubled adolescents in 1990, I was surprised to see that the the clinical professionals with whom I worked, tread very lightly, if at all, around the issue of sexual identity in the kids we saw. In fact, on the only occasion I saw it addressed directly, one of the more highly placed professionals in the program angrily denied that it was a precipitant to or a factor in other clinical issues.

I’m not qualified to speak deeply about clinical pathology, but at the same time I knew that gay kids coming of age in a deeply homophobic society faced challenges that I clearly hadn’t experience and therefore didn’t understand. I did know that gay kids suffered a very high rate of suicidality.

Things have changed, fortunately. Here is a reading on homosexuality along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This has, along the way in my time as a teacher, become a high-interest item, so 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.

Word Root Exercise: Sphere

OK: finally, on this rainy April morning, here is a worksheet on the Greek word root sphere. It means ball. I’ll assume I needn’t belabor the point that students should know this root, which is also, per se, a noun in the English language as well as combining to make a variety of nouns in the sciences and mathematics.

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.

A Lesson Plan on the Crime and Puzzlement Case “The Awesome Treasure”

Because they are, so to speak, flying off the shelf, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Awesome Treasure.”

I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “Any Port in a Storm.” This scan of the illustration and questions drives the case; this typescript of the answer key helps you solve it.

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.

Braggadocio

“Braggadocio (noun): Bumptious bragging or self-inflation; boastful language. Adj. braggadocian.

‘…the fancy lingoes of psychiatry, pedagogy, welfare, and big business—these are the twentieth century equivalents of ‘tall talk,’ sharing in the windiness of the nineteenth-century variety, but unlike it, incredibly dull and vapid. The hyperbole, grotesquery, and braggadocio survive only in American slang.’ Thomas Pyles, Words and Ways of American English

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.