Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This pithy apercu comes to us from the pen of Ben Franklin. He was a master of these kinds of phrases–many of which we still use in both colloquial and formal English.
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 worksheeet on the verb banish. It is used only transitively so don’t forget your direct object: you must banish something–an unfaithful lover, cigarettes and the like. It means, variously, “to require by authority to leave a country,” “to drive out or remove from a home or place of usual resort or continuance,” and “to clear away, dispel.” This is a word that pops up across the humanities curriculum, and particularly in social studies. In my experience students don’t know it.
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 this final lesson plan of the prepositions unit that I have posted piecemeal over the years. That means there is a complete unit of seven lessons on using prepositions in prose on this blog. To find them, search “prepositions lesson plans” in the little box just to your right. Your search should yield all seven lessons.
Anyway, I open this lesson with this Everyday Edit worksheet on the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The work for this lesson will extend into a second day, so here is another Everyday Edit on Sarah Chldress Polk, First Lady. If you and your students find Everyday Edits useful–I’ve had a few students over the years who have found these documents so intellectually satisfying that they asked for more of them–you can click over to Education World, where the proprietors of that site generously supply a yearlong supply of them at no cost.
Finally, here is the worksheet and organizer upon which the work of this lesson, and the entire unit, really, is inscribed.
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 differentiating the use of the adjectives impassible and impassable in prose. Actually, this isn’t a problem, I expect, most primary and secondary students will encounter. In the event they do, however, let me summarize this full-page document, with a three-sentence reading and ten modified cloze exercises: impassible is a non-standard version of impassive, which means, variously, “giving no sign of feeling or emotion,” “unsusceptible to or destitute of emotion,” and “unsusceptible to physical feeling.”
Impassable, on the other hand, simply means “incapable of being passed, traveled, crossed, or surmounted.” If nothing else, this is a simple usage exercise capable, I think, of helping students understand why good usage makes good writing, and also meets the Common Core Standard: “(L.11-12.1b)-Resolve issues of complex or contested usage, consulting references, (e.g., Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, Garner’s Modern American Usage) as needed.” Professor Brians’ book (which, incidentally, he allows access to at no cost at the Washington State University website) works well for this task or practice, I think, particularly where emergent or struggling readers are concerned.
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 Greek roots phyt/o and –phyte. They mean “plant” and “to grow.” If you teach in the hard sciences, particularly biology, this might be a useful document for you: these roots yield words such as chrysophyte, hydrophyte, and phytochrome among others.
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 the oxymoron as a rhetorical device. This is a half-page worksheet with a one-sentence reading, a relatively uncomplicated compound, with three comprehension questions. A simple introduction to this commonly used rhetorical move, even in everyday conversation.
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 adjective assiduous. It means, as you probably know, “marked by careful unremitting attention or persistent application,” e.g. “an assiduous book collector,” “tended her garden with assiduous attention.” I stipulate that this isn’t exactly a high-frequency word in English. It is, however, a useful one.
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 reading on time as a philosophical concept, along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The reading invokes Kant, Leibniz, and Newton; as I recall, I wrote this about ten years ago for a student interested in philosophy. I don’t know that I or anyone else as looked at it since. Here it is for your use. Remember that like everything else on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Microsoft Word documents, so you can tailor them to your students’ needs.
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.
Grammar: Rules of a language governing its phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics; also, a written summary of such rules. The first Europeans to write grammar texts were the Greeks, notably the Alexandrians of the 1st century BC. The Romans applied the Greek grammatical system to Latin, The works of the Latin Grammarians Donatus (4th century BC) and Priscian (6th century) were widely used to teach grammar in Medieval Europe. By 1700, grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been printed. These were mainly used for teaching and were intended to reform or standardize language. In the 19th-20th centuries linguists began studying languages to trace their evolution father than to prescribe correct usage. Descriptive linguists (see Ferdinand de Saussure) studied spoken language by collecting and analyzing sample sentences. Transformational grammarians (see Noam Chomsky) examined the underlying structure of language (see generative grammar). The older approach to grammar as a body of rules needed to speak and write correctly is still the basis of primary and secondary teaching.
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
On the first day of a very badly needed spring break, here is a worksheet on the Latin word roots ram and rami. They mean branch. This root does not produce a bumper crop of high-frequency English words: it gives us ramification, and therefore ramify–or vice versa, because there is a good chance the verb emerged first. This is a Latin root, and as we know from history, the Romans loved action. However, this root also sprouts biramous (“having two branches”) ramus (“a projecting part, elongated process, or branch,” “the posterior more or less vertical part on each side of the lower jaw that articulates with the skull,” and “a branch of a nerve”), which may actually have use for students interested in entering healthcare professions, and ramose (“consisting of or having branches”).
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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