Here, on a warm and muggy (yet quite chilly in this building, with the air conditioning laboring against less than one-tenth of the human bodies that normally complement this building) Tuesday morning is a short exercise on the Greek word roots xer/o and xeri. They mean dry.
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 a worksheet on the Greek word root agog, which you will know doubt recognize as the basis of the word pedagogue. It means leader and to lead. With another Greek root, ped/o (child), you can see how pedagogue means, literally, “leader of children,” i.e., teacher.
Unlike the longer word root exercises on this site, this is a short exercise meant to open a class session before continuing on to a period-length lesson.
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.
I’ve struggled with this worksheet on the Greek Word root –mancy for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it means divination which Merriam-Webster defines as the art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers. I’ve used this worksheet in the classroom, mainly to assess students’ ability to recognize the pattern in the definitions, which all include the word divination front and center.
However, that hasn’t done much to help students understand the larger meaning of these four words. I’ve added some context clues sentences to the worksheet to guide students toward the meaning of divination, rather than just telling them the definition, which I don’t like to do–students themselves need to use the word to master its meaning.
I realize that these aren’t some of the most commonly used words in the English language (although if one studies intellectual and/or religious history, as I did as an undergraduate, the word necromancy comes up more often than you’d imagine it would). That said, these are abstract words, and many of the students I serve need assistance in understanding abstract concepts and the words that represent them. This worksheet might be best thought of as a useful intellectual exercise in vocabulary building for struggling students–using words that students may never use themselves.
Needless to say, I hope, I don’t necessarily consider this some of my best work. If you were ever inclined to comment on something you take away from Mark’s Text Terminal, I entreat you for your assessment of this–in my opinion, on this date–dubious worksheet.
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.
Occasionally, if a few minutes remain in a period after a lesson, I’ll pull out a short exercise to keep students busy. Often, these are things like this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the french noun je ne sais quoi. I tell kids that while this isn’t something they will be tested on–and what a dismal standard for assessing the importance of knowledge that is!–but rather something they will need for cocktail party chatter when they become successful professionals.
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 a short exercise on the Greek word root latry which your students will quickly figure out means, when it appears in word, worship of something. I use these exercises at the beginning of lessons to get students settled and thinking in terms of patterns in knowledge.
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 this week’s Text, heading into the Memorial Day weekend I assume most of us so badly need, I offer you this context clues worksheet on the transitive verb equip, and this one on the verb, also transitive, provision. These words mean roughly the same thing, excepting the the second definition of equip, which is transitive and means prepared. The second definition is used more as a participle with a linking verb.
For some reason, this draft blog post has lingered in my folder for a few months, and I cannot imagine why, or what my purpose was in putting it there in the first place. I think I wrote the above two context clues worksheets for a global studies lesson, then just folded them into this post. In using them, I recall I was surprised at how few students knew the verb equip. As a verb, I guess, provision is a little less often used to describe the act or preparation for an event, usually an expedition of some kind. That said, I can hear Shelby Foote, describing a battle in Ken Burns’ Civil War Documentary and using provision as a verb.
Anyway, to complement the worksheets published in the first paragraph, above, I also offer these two worksheets on Greek word roots iatr/o and icon/o. They mean, respectively, healing, medical treatment and image. Unlike other word root worksheets I post, these are short exercises designed to begin a class period by focusing and settling students. As I’ve said before about word roots, a corollary to the vocabulary building benefit of these exercises is passively training students to recognize patterns in language, the kind of deep-structure instruction that scholars in the learning sciences encourage teachers to deliver.
That’s it. I wish you a respectful and appropriately somber Memorial Day.
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.
I’d hoped to begin the New Year with something splashy, but circumstances require that I focus on getting my ducks in a row in my classroom. So, here is a worksheet on the Latin roots viv, vivi. and vit. It means, of course, life, living, and live.
That’s it for this week; I’ll do my best to have something a little better for next week. February and March are Black History Month and Women’s History Month respectively, and I’ve already begun to line up a series of readings and comprehension worksheets in observation of those months.
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, I fell under whatever it is that has afflicted most of the faculty at my school. My doctor, when I finally made it to him, diagnosed bronchitis, something I contract with irritating regularity working in a windowless building with almost 800 adolescents.
So, the Text for this week is nothing special, just this word root worksheet on the Greek roots the and theo. It means, as you probably already know, God. It is surely useful in social studies classes where words like polytheism and monotheism crop up regularly. Given the results of the presidential election, kids might need to know the word theocracy as well.
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.
OK: tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I am thankful for the day off, and for the short break of which it is a part. Here is a word root worksheet on the Latin word root ver; it means true. As you can see on the worksheet itself, ver is at the root of several key words in the academic lexicon.
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.
Oh–and Happy Thanksgiving!
We’re in the home stretch of the school year, and not a moment to soon: about three weeks ago, several students I work with began arriving with shell-shocked looks on their faces, and even further attenuation in their attention spans.
I understand. I feel how they look, as I regularly tell them.
This week’s Text is two context clues worksheets on two essential words, paternal and maternal. If you haven’t used these before, you might find the users’ manual for context clues worksheets useful. These complement a couple of word root worksheets I posted in March: the first one is on the Latin word roots patr, patri and pater, and the second on the Latin word roots mat, matri, and mater.
As always, if you find these worksheets useful, I would be much obliged to hear how–particularly if you modified them for your classroom.
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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