Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the state of Mississippi that might be useful for a variety of lessons.
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 are two context clues worksheets on de facto and de jure. Both of these Latin terms are used as adverbs and adjectives. I would argue that these are two terms that represent conceptual understanding students really ought to have upon high school graduation.
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’s another late-summer Text, this one, a complete introductory lesson plan for verbs. At the change of class, when students arrive and need a moment of assistance to settle, I use this Cultural Literacy exercise on verbs; in case the lesson goes into a second day, for whatever reason, I keep this Everyday Edit worksheet on Poe’s ‘The Raven'” ready (and, incidentally, you can find a year’s worth of Everyday Edit worksheets at Education World, where the proprietors of that site give them away). The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on identifying and using verbs. Finally, you might want teacher’s copy of the 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.
The second post immediately below this one is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on pandemics. In that post I mention that one can discern the Greek word root dem within that noun, and that dem–or, as in the case of this Greek word root worksheet, dem/o and demi–means people. That said, I must make note of, and offer caution on account of, the fact that in Latin the root demi means half or less than. Now you know why espresso is served in a demitasse.
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.
Teachers working in social studies or science may find this Cultural Literacy worksheet on pandemics useful. For a literacy connection, nota bene the Greek root dem in this word; it means people, and shows up in other words like democracy and demography, both words related to people. If you look at the post two above this one, you’ll in fact find a word root worksheet on that Greek word root.
Pan, another Greek root, simply means all. You can see that these two word roots, which meet in the noun pandemic, give students an opportunity for some synthetic thinking about these two roots and the words in English they produce.
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 context clues worksheet on the noun evidence which I would imagine could find its way into a variety of lessons across domains–and probably across grade levels, depending on one’s students.
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 lesson plan on the causes of history. I use this in the first few days of school for a variety of reasons, but primarily to demonstrate to students that in our global studies class, they will do the thinking and talking, and in so doing, I seek to get them to think about the conceptual meaning of history. If you look at the bottom of the lesson plan, I’ve included a snippet of text on what I think are, for the purposes of a global studies course for high school freshmen, the nine most salient drivers of history. I often ask students to make a class poster of that text after the lesson concludes.
The lesson begins with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s famous maxim, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This strikes me as a key piece of Cultural Literacy (I have, incidentally, heard this quote attributed to Aristotle, Karl Marx, and John F. Kennedy, among others), but it also serves as a provocative dish where food for thought goes, and students often take it as a reason to take history seriously as a subject. If the lesson goes into a second day–and depending on the loquacity of your students, and their willingness to participate class discussions, this lesson can even go into a third day, as it has for me on a couple of occasions–then you might want this context clues worksheet on the noun barbarian to take your through. And, nota bene, if this lesson does run to three days, there are plenty of other short exercises on this blog you can use to open this lesson.
Finally, here is the worksheet for this lesson that is really simply a note-taking template. This is a brainstorming and discussion lesson, and as such it is an attempt to draw students into the life of classroom discourse right at the very beginning of the year. My long experience shows me that the sooner a teacher engages students at this level, the better results he or she will get over the course of the school year.
This lesson also attempts, as you will see when you use it, to get students thinking and speaking abstractly, interpretively, and extemporaneously–again, the essence of brainstorming. If students identify Trade and Commercial Interaction as a cause of history, ask how and why. Of course we highly trained teacher of social studies understand the way trade–with expanded human interaction, the need for written language, the way diets change and culture spreads, and so forth–affects history. We need to make sure our students understand that as well, and chances are pretty good the possess the prior knowledge to draw those conclusions. As I used to plead with a co-teacher, “For heaven’s sake, ask them [i.e. the students] a question!”
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 are four parsing sentences worksheets for conjunctions that might be useful as short exercises on days when students struggle to sustain attention.
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.
At my school, teachers in all four common branch subjects assign research papers as a matter of academic routine. Unfortunately, as far as I’ve seen and therefore know, nobody on the faculty has developed explicit instructions and materials teaching the numerous skills involved in assembling research, let alone judging, organizing and synthesizing it. Nor does anyone teach argumentation (I assume it goes without saying that we have no debate or forensics team), a key skill for composing a synthetic research paper.
For years, this rankled me as the bad practice it clearly is. Last year, I finally resolved to do something about it: I wrote this unit plan on argumentation, which I titled “Arguing Your Case.” All of this work is adapted, as the unit plan explains in its “Methods and Materials” section, from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s excellent manual They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2017). As I write this, the Third Edition lies before me on my desk; this is a textbook, evidently, that will go into numerous editions.
But the gravamen of the book–using basic rhetorical figures to structure argumentative discourse–will certainly remain the same. I’ve already posted the first two lessons from this unit (you’ll find them here and here). Here is the third lesson plan from the “Arguing Your Case” unit, this one on using the “They say” and “Standard views” procedure for laying out, in one’s argument, the current research, conventional wisdom, or what have you, on a particular subject. I use this context clues worksheet on the noun discourse to open this lesson, Finally, here is the combination of a learning support and worksheet that students use to get a sense of how to perform the academic task at hand.
I wrote this unit for more advanced students than I usually teach. If you plan to use this material with struggling learners, particularly kids with low levels of general or academic literacy, you will almost certainly need to edit the texts in the worksheet, which, frankly, I cribbed from The New York Review of Books.
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.
As it always does, summer passed quickly, and the first day of school is right around the corner. I use this context clues worksheet on the verb differentiate, which is used both transitively and intransitively, sometime in the first week of classes to help the struggling learners I serve understand what happens instructionally in our classroom.
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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