Here is a worksheet on the Greek word root lith/o. It means stone and rock. Simple enough, and useful if you happen to be teaching geology in particular or earth science in general.
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 verb matriculate, which is used both intransitively and transitively. This is the last of the Words of the Day from Merriam-Webster while I was away for the Labor Day weekend.
Teachers, especially high school teachers, as well as guidance counselors, will agree, I hope, that students ought to know this word as they proceed toward their graduation days. It’s probably worth mentioning, for linguistic purposes, that after students matriculate, work for four years, then graduate, their relationship with their college is characterized by the noun alma mater, i.e. “nourishing mother.” These words stem from the Latin word roots matr, matri, and mater, which mean “mother.”
In fact, I’ll link to this word root exercise on matr, matri, and mater in the event you want to take this inquiry a bit further.
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.
Can you use this worksheet on the Latin word roots arium, orium and ary? They mean, simply, “a place for.” When you consider words like aquarium, emporium, and aviary, you begin to see just how productive this word root is in 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 worksheet on the Latin word root aqua. Do I need to tell you it means water? It is an extremely productive root in English as well as the all the Romance languages.
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.
Last but not least, today, here is a short worksheet on the Greek word root ornith/o, which means, of course, bird. If you’ve downloaded other word-root worksheets from Mark’s Text Terminal, please be advised that this one is a much shorter exercise. Its purpose is as a do-now exercise, something short to start off a class period.
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.
Over the years, I’ve set out several times to write a context clues worksheet for the noun forte, and then never finished. So when it popped up as Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day a few days back, I resolved to finally complete what should be a fairly mundane task. After all, forte is in fairly common use, isn’t it?
So I’m not sure why I heretofore struggled with writing this context clues worksheet on the noun forte. It means “one’s strong point” for the purposes of this worksheet and it’s the only way I use it in speech. But it has other meanings, including, as a noun, “the part of a sword or foil blade that is between the middle and the hilt and that is the strongest part of the blade.” Also as a noun, in the context of music, it means “a tone or passage played forte : a musical tone or passage played loudly.” So it is subtly polysemous.
I’ve always pronounced it “for-tay.” But there is contention about that. I’ll spare you the details, other than the topic sentence from a lengthy excursus from Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, on pronouncing forte: “In forte we have a word derived from French that in its ‘strong point’ sense has no entirely satisfactory pronunciation.”
Whatever the case, this is a word educated people use in discourse, so our students should learn it for that reason alone.
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.
“How many monsters does Beowulf kill? Three—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon. The Old English poem Beowulf is thought to date from the eighth century.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, foreign languages/linguistics, poetry
This worksheet on the Greek roots hexa– and hex– builds students’ English vocabulary with words based on these two roots, which means six. Needless to say, these two roots are very productive in English, especially producing words used in science and mathematics education, as this document will demonstrate for you and your 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.
“Alpha * Epsilon * Eta * Iota * Omicron * Upsilon * Omega
The vowels have always been linked to the seven heavens, most famously in Hebrew, where the seven unwritten vowels created the sound for God—Jehovah. The link between the language of man and the presumed languages of the seven Heavenly spheres has always been speculated upon. However, it is one of the more arcane secrets of the mystics which of the seven planets is linked to which vowel.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Several years ago, an old friend of mine enrolled her middle-school-aged son in a prestigious private school in Connecticut. One afternoon she mentioned in passing that she struggled to help him get through his Latin homework.
Latin homework for a middle-school student?!?
In fact, as I started to think about this, an experience from my own education suddenly made sense. As an undergraduate in the Five College Consortium, I studied the Russian language in one of the colleges in that system. I’d had a year of Spanish in high school and learned a functional version of the language in my travels through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. So I understood gendered nouns and conjugating verbs, though I was no expert at the latter.
Russian, however, was the first heavily inflected language I’d encountered. I really did struggle with oblique cases and all the rules that governed them and the usage rules they themselves governed. My fellow students appeared at ease with Russian. When I gave some thought to my friend’s son studying Latin, it suddenly occurred to me: my fellow Russian students almost certainly gained their understanding of the inflected structure of Russian because they had studied Latin–either in middle or high school.
It so happened that I began using Latin and Greek word roots–with which the English language is relatively rife–for vocabulary building early on in my teaching career. Because many of my students spoke Spanish as their first language, Latin was inevitably a bridge to English for them, and they figured that out quite quickly. They also figured out that as a rule, Latin is offered in in some of the best high schools in the United States, so there was, even in the limited way they were learning it with me, some status and prestige in learning the lingua franca of the Roman empire.
So I figured that if Latin was good enough for students at Phillips Exeter, it was good enough for the inner-city kids under my tutelage. Over the years, I’ve developed a number of materials on Latin and Latinisms (if you search those two terms on this blog, you’ll find a plethora of materials) for use in my classroom.
So when it was the word of the day a few days back at Merriam-Webster, I let if go by at first; but within a few hours, I’d worked up this worksheet on the Latin noun ne plus ultra. It means, as I think the comparatively strong context in its sentences indicate, “the highest point to be attained.” Will our students ever use this noun in conversation? Not very likely. Will they encounter this word in academic or scholarly prose? There is at least a chance of that. Will this worksheet school them in an analytical reading method? My experience is, in using context clues worksheets for years, that it will. Will kids think it cool to possess this piece of arcane knowledge? In my experience some if not most do.
So that’s the reason for this post.
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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