OK, finally today, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on feudalism. It’s a convenient introduction to a complicated subject.
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.
“Afraid. Do not say ‘I am afraid it will rain.’ Say, I fear that it will rain.”
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 a context clues worksheet on the verb couch, which is used both intransitively and transitively. Given how much bigotry is couched in social media posts and elsewhere, this seems like a good word to know right now.
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.
“Doctrinaire (adjective): Characterized by impractical, abstract doctrine or speculative opinion and thus narrow in point of view; rigidly theoretical or parochial, without flexibility or regard to circumstances; stubbornly doctrinal. Adverb: doctrinarily; noun: doctrinairism, doctrinaire, doctrinairian.
‘But there is, for me, a certain softness in her argument, based as it is on a diagnosis of psychology that is both excessively doctrinaire in its remedy and equivocal.’ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation“
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
OK, folks, here is the big post of the day, to wit, a lesson plan on nouns as the indirect objects of verbs. I open this lesson with this worksheet on homophones worksheet on the verbs (and nouns) compliment and complement. Here is the scaffolded worksheet at the center of this lesson; here too is teacher’s copy of the worksheet.
Now a few quick words of explanation. The verb and noun complement is often used in grammar manuals to describe predicates consisting of direct and indirect objects (and by the way, I posted a lesson plan on nouns as the direct objects of verbs a few days back that works well with this lesson), so I want students to recognize that meaning of this polysemous word when they see it. As I mentioned in the post on direct objects, this point of grammar will help students when they undertake to study a foreign language. Direct and indirect objects, particularly in inflected languages, require different case endings. For example, in Russian the direct object takes the accusative case ending, but indirect objects are in the dative case.
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 worksheet on the Greek word root zyg/o. It means pair. It forms the basis of the noun zygote, among many other scientific words. This is yet another word students should know if they are interested in a career in the healthcare professions.
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.
If you have by any chance showed “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to your homebound students, or plan to, then you might find that this reading on the Temple and the Holy Ark and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet complements that exciting film.
I’ve tagged this as high-interest material because when I have offered it to students while making its connection to the Indiana Jones movie referred to above, their interest was piqued.
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.
It’s not exactly a word in common use, but here, nonetheless, is a context clues worksheet on the noun copse. It’s worth remembering, I think, that the purpose of these context clues worksheets are to assist students in developing their own understanding of this reading comprehension strategy–i.e. inferring the meaning of a word from the context in which it is embedded.
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, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the Hapsburgs.
Incidentally, if you are interested in turning this into high-interest material, you might note for students the infamous “Habsburg Jaw” (the dynasty’s name, I discover in researching this post, is spelled with both a p and a b), a visual metaphor for the inbreeding that occurred in this family. In fact, this family’s incestuous relationships are so well known that even the brilliant hit comedy series “30 Rock” wrote them into an episode starring, as Gerhardt Hapsburg, the great Paul Reubens (a.k.a. “Peewee Herman“).
I’ve never announced this fact about the Hapsburgs and have this material fall flat. Once students get beyond the obvious gross-out dimension of this story, there is a lot of room for a discussion of both literal and figurative incest in ruling-class families and how this affected and continues to affect sovereignty and power in nation-states.
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 lesson plan on understanding and differentiating historical dates which I have actually previously posted on Mark’s Text Terminal. While this is a social studies lesson on understanding how we use numbers to count and describe historical time, it has an ulterior literacy motive in that it seeks to help students, particularly the many English language learners I have served over the years.
We use two types of numbers when we talk about historical dates, ordinal and cardinal. Ordinal numbers are adjectives that, as their name indicates, place things in order. So, when we use terms like fourteenth century, fifteenth century, and so on, we are using ordinal numbers. Similarly, when we say, respectively, the 1300s, the 1400s, and so on, we are using cardinal numbers, which are nouns and which we use to count things. These two types of numbers are different in English just as they are different in other languages. Because I didn’t initially understand the difference between these kinds of numbers, I struggled to understand the numbering system in Russian when I studied that language.
For that reason, I wrote this context clues worksheet on the adjective ordinal and this on the noun phrase cardinal number. These worksheets aim to help students understand the difference between these two types of numbers and their use in English prose. This is knowledge that transfers across the curriculum–to foreign languages, English language arts, mathematics itself, and, yes, social studies.
Finally, here is the combined learning support and worksheet that is the gravamen 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.
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