Tag Archives: learning supports

The Weekly Text, August 25, 2017: A Lesson Plan on Using Prepositions with Pronouns in the Objective Case

Last spring, while teaching my unit on prepositions, I found I needed to revise and strengthen this lesson plan on using prepositions with pronouns in the objective case; as long as I had it out, I duplicated and set it aside for a future text, and that future has arrived, so here it is as a Weekly Text.

To teach this lesson you’ll need the two do-now exercises (and, as I’ve written here before, if you like Everyday Edits, the good people at Education World generously give them away), the first of which is an Everyday Edit on Charles Drew; the second, another Everyday Edit, this one on the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, you may need if classroom exigencies extend this lesson into a second day. The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using prepositions with the objective case of pronouns. Your students and you will probably find useful this learning support to accompany the worksheet.

I design my worksheets, as you’ll see explained in the About Weekly Texts on the home page banner, so that I can insert students’ names in them as both subject and object noun. This worksheet is, in terms of these insertions, complicated sufficiently that I’ve decided to include in this post this finished copy, ready for classroom use, of the worksheet to demonstrate how to fill the asterisks with subject and object nouns in the worksheet itself. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet which serves as the answer key as well.

That’s it. I hope this lesson is useful to you, and not marred by its prolixity.

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.

A Super Multiplication Table

As a child, I enjoyed math in school and did fairly well at it. I liked the symmetry and order of numbers, and found multiplication a particularly scintillating procedure (and yes, I am serious; I was a weird kid). By the time I crossed the Rubicon from fractions and decimals into algebra, I could already see I was in trouble. For some reason, I could never get right orders of operations and other algebraic procedures. For some reason I felt, and continue to feel, ashamed of this intellectual inadequacy.

Of course, I am tempted to blame my math teachers in middle school, who were indeed dismal; both of my eighth grade math teachers clearly hated kids. Since I was getting more than enough of that sentiment elsewhere in my life at the time, I avoided them. So I suppose I am at fault as well.

Unsurprisingly, I have been and remain a terrible math teacher. I’ve developed some literacy lessons on both math and science, but they are more reading comprehension work than actual cognitive work in the domains themselves. That said, I have become interested (to some extent for obvious personal reasons) in helping struggling students improve their own understanding of the math curriculum they are expected to master. To that end, I’ve proposed to a colleague in the mathematics department at my school that we collaborate on developing some math learning supports for our struggling students.

This morning I wrote this super multiplication table as a start on this endeavor. I know this doesn’t necessarily augur great sophistication in this project; it’s worth considering, however, how many students who struggle with math do so because they never learned their multiplication tables. As with all of the material posted on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document that you can chop and repurpose as many times as your circumstances require. Indeed, you may end up with as many versions of this as you have 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.

A Midsummer Text: Five Worksheets on Differentiating the Homophones Who’s and Whose

I’ve been working on a series of new homophone worksheets, including these five on the who’s and whose and this learning support to accompany them.

I assume you see these words confused regularly, as they are two of the most commonly confused homophones in the English language. Writing these worksheets, I’m afraid I let the material get away from me. Endeavoring to create materials that helped students form their own, comprehensive, understanding of these two words, I wrote a lot of text that I realized, after it was down on paper, was too much information for worksheet instructions. I turned quite a bit of the text into the learning support post in this Text. However, the worksheets themselves still may be prolix by virtue of the still-lengthy definitions of these two words and their definitions,

In any case, these are Word documents, so you may manipulate them for your use.

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 Weekly Text, July 21, 2017: A Lesson Plan on Using the Degrees of Adjectives

This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on using the degrees of adjectives. To refresh your memory, the three degrees of adjectives are the positive (big), the comparative (bigger) and the superlative, (biggest). Two do-now exercises open this unit, the first a parsing sentences worksheet on verbs and the second a Cultural Literacy Worksheet on acronyms. (I include as a matter of course two do-now exercises in the event that a lesson runs into a second day because of interruptions.) The mainstay of the lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using the three degrees of adjectives. You may also want to use this learning support on the degrees of adjectives. Finally, you might find the teacher’s copy of the worksheet useful while giving this lesson.

Finally, this lesson affords you an opportunity, should you care to emphasize it, to point out to students that they will always, after the comparative adjective, use the conjunction than and not the adverb then.

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.

A Reading and Comprehension Worksheet on Understanding Memory

To add a third to the two Intellectual Devotional Readings on oppositional defiant disorder and learning I posted below, here is an Intellectual Devotional reading on memory and a reading comprehension worksheet to complement it.

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 Weekly Text, July 7, 2017: A Lesson Plan on Adverbs Modifying Verbs

One week into the summer break, and I am taking advantage of everything New York City has to offer in this season, including the wonderful Jazzmobile, one of the greatest cultural institutions in our city, which obviously boasts so many of them. If you’re coming into the Five Boroughs from elsewhere, please know this: Jazzmobile concerts are free, held in some of our most beautiful parks, and superlative. If you go, make sure you put a few bucks in the collection bucket. Jazzmobile presents world-class musicians, and to see them in a club like the Village Vanguard or the Blue Note would cost you real money.

OK, now back to the English Language Arts Desk. This week’s Text is a complete lesson plan on adverbs modifying verbs. This lesson begins with one of two do-now exercises (or both if the lesson runs into a second day), the first a Cultural Literacy Worksheet on stereotypes, and the second a parsing sentences worksheet on adverbs. You might find this word bank of adverbs useful as a learning support. The mainstay of the lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on adverbs modifying verbs. Finally, you may find this teacher’s copy of the worksheet helps you in delivering this lesson.

That’s it. I hope you are enjoying your summer.

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.

A Learning Support on Irregular Verbs

As the penultimate week of the New York City school year comes to a close, I want to post this learning support on irregular verbs, which I gleaned from Grant Barrett’s manual, Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking. I believe strongly in teaching grammar, style, and usage to the struggling learners I serve. With the right structural adaptations, kids can master this material, and therefore gain confidence in their ability to learn. That confidence motivates kids, and for the teacher education special needs kids, that is half the battle.

Over the years, I’ve sought a good–by which I mean clear and concise–grammar manual to use in planning units and lesson. So far, this is the one: Mr. Barrett presents his material lucidly, with none of abstraction, cuteness, or turgidity these from which so many of these kinds of books suffer. The book is also very well organized.

Grant Barrett also hosts a podcast called A Way with Words. I haven’t listened yet, but as I work with this book, I can see the merit of giving it a try.

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.

The Weekly Text, June 23, 2017: A Lesson Plan on Using the Predicate Adjective

Summer break is nigh upon us here in New York City, and not a moment too soon. For the past couple of weeks we have endured the inanity of the New York State Regents Examinations.

This week’s Text is a complete lesson on using the predicate adjective in declarative sentences. There are two do-now worksheets to accompany this lesson in the event that the lesson runs into two days: the first is an Everyday Edit on Laura Ingalls Wilder; the second is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the common Latinism in English, nota bene. This lesson also provides a a word bank of predicate adjectives that serves as a learning support. You’ll need this scaffolded worksheet on the predicate adjectives for your students; to deliver this lesson, I find it’s handy to have this teacher’s copy and answer key.

That’s it. I hope this is useful to you.

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.

Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow

(An old friend of mine who teaches at the college level emailed me over the weekend with questions about E.L. Doctorow’s novel Ragtime. It has been more than 30 years since I read the novel, and my reading of it was no doubt colored and informed by the movie, which I saw before reading the book. In any case, her question sent me to my copy of Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia [Fourth Edition] for answers; I wrote it up, and post it here. This discourse also reminded me of Mr. Doctorow’s famously controversial commencement address at Brandeis University in 1989, which in our current political environment looks innocently prescient.)

Ragtime (1975) A novel by E.L. Doctorow. Set in New York between the turn of the century and the beginning of World War I, the novel revolves around three interlocking groups of characters: a family of Jewish immigrants from the Lower East Side, their upper-class WASP counterparts from New Rochelle, and a black piano player, Coalhouse Walker, and his wife. Walker, probably based on the character of rag composer Scott Joplin, is a proud black man who, as a result of racism and insults, is driven to desperate acts. The evocation of World War I is enriched by the the interaction of Doctorow’s characters with such real-life figures as Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Booker T. Washington, and C.G. Jung. Doctorow’s prose conveys a sense of his story by maintaining a contrapuntal, ragtime cadence.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

The Weekly Text, June 2, 2017: An Introductory Lesson on Prepositions

OK: It has been some time since I posted an entire lesson plan, so for this week’s Text I offer a complete lesson that introduces students to prepositions. This lesson begins with two (the second one in the event that the lesson runs to two days) do-now exercises, namely Everyday Edits worksheets, the first one on the Surrender at Appomattox and the the second one on the Modern Olympic Games. (Incidentally, if you like these Everyday Edit Worksheets, the good people at Education World give them away at their site, and you will find the answer keys to them there as well.)

The mainstay of this lesson is this scaffolded proofreading and cloze exercise worksheet that introduces students to prepositions and their uses. Here is a learning support on prepositions that accompanies this lesson (and all six lessons in this unit, which I will post over time, I suppose). Finally, here is a teacher’s copy and answer key to assist you as you deliver this lesson.

That’s it. 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.