Here is a learning support on the conventions for writing numbers in prose. This document has a big open field, and is in Microsoft Word, so it is at your–and more importantly, your students’–disposal; you can modify or adapt it to your needs.
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 learning support on joint possessives‘ cribbed from Paul Brians’ Common Errors in English Usage.
Professor Brians does a nice job of explaining how best to handle this tricky construction and make it sound proper and read the same way. You will not that joint possessive constructions are trickiest with pronouns.
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.
Posted in English Language Arts
“mapping: In educational terms, a strategy for displaying related ideas in a visual format. Mapping may refer to flow charts, diagrams, or using color coding to draw connections and help recall information. One important example of mapping is ‘mind-mapping’ (also called clustering), which is used in the process of writing to generate and organize ideas and information that can eventually be translated into a linear outline.
A mind map might consist of a core topic at the center of the page, with major subtopics spreading outward from it, and relevant details attached to each subtopic. Such an approach may be especially helpful for individuals who have difficulty with sequencing information but are strong in the area or visual-spatial reasoning.
Likewise a graphic organizer for representing information may help a student who has trouble with reading comprehension because of problems organizing and identifying key information and relationships between concepts and supporting evidence.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
OK, here is a learning support on capitalization. This is a bare-bones document–a single paragraph excerpted from Paul Brians’ book Common Errors in English Usage. This is (as is most of what you’ll find on Mark’s Text Terminal) is a Microsoft Word document, so you can manipulate it as is or easily export it to a word processor of your choice. There is plenty of blank space on this page to, say, make a worksheet or whatever else you may see fit to to with 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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Here is a learning support on five kinds of sentences. I grabbed this from Sylvan Barnet and Marcia Stubbs’ Barnet and Stubbs Practical Guide to Writing with Readings, Seventh Edition (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). I used an earlier edition of this book for the very first college course I took in the spring of 1990. When I mentioned my admiration for the utility and ease of use of the book, a friend of mine thoughtfully made me a gift of the edition cited above.
Anyway, this learning support doesn’t deal with the four kinds of sentences, i.e. declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory, for which I am currently preparing learning supports which will appear here in the near future. This document deals with syntactical structures, to wit, the simple, compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences, as well as the sentence fragment. It’s one page, so it’s simple but (I hope) helpful because of that simplicity.
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 lesson plan on using the indefinite pronouns.
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the proverb “any port in a storm.” In the event the lesson continues into a second day, I keep this Everyday Edit (and if you like these, the good people at Education World give away a year’s worth of them) worksheet on Duke Ellington handy. This scaffolded worksheet on using the indefinite pronouns is the mainstay of the lessons. Here is a learning support on subject-verb agreement when working with the indefinite pronouns that students can both use with the work of this lesson and carry away for future reference. And, finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet to make delivering this lesson a little bit easier.
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.
It’s an important syntactical structure and area of English usage, so I have written several lessons on the predicate adjective; I want students to have this sentence structure and its parts, especially linking verbs, down cold. So, this week’s Text is yet another lesson plan on the predicate adjective.
I open this lesson with this worksheet on the Latinism N.B., or nota bene. The first time I saw this abbreviation on a piece of my Russian language homework in college, I looked it up and mastered its use. It is a phrase students ought to know. This is the scaffolded worksheet on using the predicate adjectives at the center of the lesson, and here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet for ease of teaching this lesson.
There are two learning supports (ultimately, I’d plan to make four, for, again, scaffolded teaching and learning). The first one is organized to provide extra support for students who need it; the second one is less organized and structured and therefore places greater demand on heuristics and the ability to search for just the right word.
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 week’s Text is a lesson plan on using the compound adjective. I open this lesson with this parsing sentences for adjectives worksheet. In the event the lesson continues into a second day, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the oxymoron as a rhetorical device.
Moving on to the work, here is the scaffolded worksheet that is at the center of the lesson. To assist students in understanding and completing this work, I have a couple of learning supports–actually, two versions of the same learning support: the first is this word bank of adjectives to use when working to fill in the cloze blank; the second is the same document structured into columns. I wrote the second one because I found I needed to be able to direct kids’ attention to the column where the best word for the cloze blanks resides.
Finally, here is the teacher’s copy (or the parents’ copy, if you like) of the worksheet for ease of teaching this lesson.
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 week’s Text is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “Seeing Double.” Judging from my download statistics, these are always a crowd pleaser.
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “Have. an ax to grind,” (which might also be usefully employed when introducing students to the methods of writing a research paper–especially scholarly disinterest). This PDF of the illustration and questions is the evidence you’ll need to conduct this investigation. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key so that you may bring the culprit to the bar of justice.
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.
“Transition: A word or group of words that aids coherence by showing the connections between ideas. William Carlos Williams was influenced by the poetry or Walt Whitman. Moreover, Williams’s emphasis on the present and the and the immediacy of the ordinary represented a rejection of the poetic stance of his contemporary T.S. Eliot. In addition, Williams’s poetry….”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
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