Here is a worksheet on the verb offer as it is used with an infinitive. Mark’s Text Terminal hereby offers to cease publishing curricular materials of questionable value and utility.
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 worksheet on the use of the verbs lay and lie. These are two commonly misused words, and Paul Brians, in his excellent book Common Errors in English Usage (which he generously makes available at no charge on his page at the Washington State University website) sorts them out in the seven-sentence reading that drives this worksheet. There are also ten modified cloze exercises for students to try their hands at using these two verbs properly.
Simply put, lay is transitive and requires a direct object: One lays one’s keys on the counter when one returns home from work. Lie is intransitive and does not require a direct object: One lies down to take a nap.
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.
This week’s Text is a quartet of context clues worksheets on words that represent important concepts to me–the idea of doing something conscientiously and well. For starters, here is the worksheet on the noun competence. It means “the quality or state of being competent.” And herein lies the challenge of teaching these words, I think: one must understand the meaning of the adjective competent (see below) to understand the noun competence.
Next up is the antonym to competence with this worksheet on the noun incompetence. This one means “the state or fact of being incompetent.” Once more, we’re stuck with the problem limned above: one must know the adjective incompetent to understand the noun incompetence (which is the problem that drives this relatively prolix and arguably nonsensical blog post). In any case, this worksheet, especially when used with the document above on competence, offers a solid opportunity to teach or reinforce the meaning of the prefix in.
Now let’s move on to the adjective that correspond to these nouns with this worksheet on competent. This worksheet points students toward the most common definitions of this word, to wit, “having requisite or adequate ability or qualities” and “having the capacity to function or develop in a particular way.”
And once again, you’ll find the antonym to competent in this worksheet on the adjective incompetent. It means “inadequate to or unsuitable for a particular purpose,” “lacking the qualities needed for effective action,” and “unable to function properly.” These definitions may require more concrete examples–of which, both fortunately and unfortunately, there are plenty in our public life.
Finally, to aid you in the work on interpreting the words in these documents, here is a lexicon for all four of these words.
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.
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on imperialism is the final documents post for National Native American Heritage Month 2023. This is a half-page worksheet with a two-sentence reading and two comprehension questions. Once again, like almost everything from The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, this reading’s brevity–it defines imperialism clearly and correctly and explicitly links it with colonialism–is its strength.
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.
OK, moving right along this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Geronimo. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of three sentences and three comprehension questions. The text is thorough and brief, a hallmark, I think, of the entries in The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Hirsch, E.D., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
Amazingly, you can find a PDF of this The Dictionary here. I’ve been copying and pasting out of this PDF, which is why of late I have produced so many new Cultural Literacy worksheets. This PDF makes them much easier to assemble.
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.
For the fourth and final Friday of National Native American Heritage Month 2023, here is a reading on Tupac Amaru II with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If you recognize this name, it is because, as you have probably already inferred, this eighteenth-century rebel against the Spanish colonial presence moved Afeni Shakur to name her son Tupac Amaru Shakur, who is of course the late, lamented, Hip-Hop star.
You’ll also find Tupac Amaru II in a namesake organization, the Tupamaros, a rebel group in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s. They were famous for urban guerilla actions in Montevideo like hijacking grocery delivery trucks, driving them into poor districts in that city, opening them, then walking away–which, editorially speaking, appears to meet or exceed the accepted standards for efficiency and effectiveness in such actions. The Tupamaros also, in one particularly famous incident, got their hands on Dan Mitrione, who was in Uruguay on behalf of the United States Central Intelligence Agency to teach torture techniques to various of the Uruguayan security services.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Tupamaros, the justly famous film by Costa-Gavras, State of Siege, tells the story of the kidnapping and murder of Dan Mitrione, often with actual documentary footage. Also, Netflix offers a documentary series on Jose Mujica, who fought with the Tupamaros, and later became president of Uruguay, called El Pepe: A Supreme Life. President Mujica is known affectionately as “El Pepe,” apparently a Spanish nickname for Jose.
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Independent Practice, Social Sciences, The Weekly Text, Worksheets
Tagged black history, building vocabulary/conceptual knowledge, diction/grammar/style/usage, film/television/photography, first nation/indigenous peoples' history, professional development, readings/research, united states history
Alright, let’s wrap up this week’s documents posts with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Quetzalcoatl. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of one short compound sentence and two questions. In other words, once again, the sparest of introductions to this important Aztec deity.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on Montezuma. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two simple sentences and two comprehension questions. This document, I think, epitomizes the concept of the do-now exercise: you know, something to settle students at the beginning of class session after a change of instructional periods? This is a spare introduction to Montezuma, more properly spelled Moctezuma, but a good place to start, I think, a discussion of the conquistadors in what we now call Latin America.
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.
For the third Friday of National Native American Heritage Month 2023, this week’s Text is a reading on Spain in the New World along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I think the effect on indigenous peoples of the arrival of Spanish explorers, then the conquistadors that succeeded them, is obvious and in no need of belaboring here. Put another way, remember that the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas were indigenous populations–and that the conquistadors’ legacy of abuse of indigenous populations persists: I offer you, as one egregious example, the late and loathsome Efrain Rios Montt.
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.
This Cultural Literacy worksheet on Native Americans is a full-page worksheet with a reading of four sentences–all but one of which are longish compounds that may need to be broken up and recast for emergent readers and English language learners–and four comprehension questions. It’s a shorter version, I suppose, of last week’s Text.
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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