This Cultural Literacy worksheet on the British Empire probably has a number of uses in a social studies classroom, including as an independent practice (i.e. homework) exercise.
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 lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Great ‘Drug’ Bust.”
If you use do-not exercises at the beginning of lessons, then the one for this lesson is this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the legend of Saint George and the Dragon. To investigate this case, you’ll need the PDF of the illustration and questions that contain the evidence of this crime. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key to help you apprehend your culprit.
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 first record I owned, at the age of ten or eleven, was Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie. My father brought it home for me one day. I loved it from the first time I listened to it, and I still listen to it now. Within a couple of years, I managed to follow Woody Guthrie’s influence to Bob Dylan, whose music I also continue to listen to almost 50 years later. In fact, many of his records, particularly Blood on the Tracks and John Wesley Harding receive almost weekly play here at Mark’s Text Terminal.
To my mind, it’s nearly impossible to underestimate the cultural importance of Bob Dylan’s work. In fact, so much ink has been spelled on it by so many astute critics that I hardly need to belabor the point here. While I know his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature is controversial, my own opinion is that the man who wrote “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna,” to mention just two of his most brilliant songs, certainly earned his laurels as a writer of lasting worth and importance.
So, last but not least on this May morning, I have two sets of readings and comprehension worksheets on Bob Dylan. The first set is a general biography of Bob Dylan’s musical career and is in some respects anodyne. The second set, which to some extent, by comparison, renders the first set of documents anodyne, is this reading and comprehension worksheet on Bob Dylan’s switch to electric music in 1965 and his legendary (or legendarily disastrous) appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in that year. It’s worth mentioning that Dylan’s appearance at Newport in 1965 is something of a cultural touchstone, both a gotterdammerung moment and an intimation of what was to come in American popular music. It pops up in various places as a reference point to a particular moment in the history of popular music.
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.
From the pages of The Order of Things, here is a lesson plan on climatic zones and they way they are organized, as well as the worksheet with list and comprehension questions that constitutes the work of 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.
Last but not least this morning, on a lovely spring morning, what’s more appropriate than a reading on Walt Whitman along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet?
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.
Last but not least this morning, here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on brainwashing. I imagine the importance of this speaks for itself.
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.
While wandering around in the warehouse yesterday morning, I came across this reading on the influenza epidemic of 1918 and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Given that this historical event has become something of a touchstone for understanding our current circumstances, i.e. the coronavirus pandemic, I can’t quite understand how I lost track of this material.
That is, until I read it. Over the years, I’ve developed a great deal of material based on the mostly excellent readings in the Intellectual Devotional series; I’ve also had a lot of success in using these materials. Students who would turn up their nose at a book, or a reading from a textbook (I especially understand the latter, as most corporate-published textbooks are lethal), will take on one of these–especially high-interest readings. This reading, however, is one of the weakest I’ve seen.
Which, however, provides some grist for the critical mill. Let’s start with the title of this reading. The influenza of 1918 was by any measure a pandemic–that’s why one of the John M. Barry’s book, The Great Influenza, one of the best on the subject, carries the subtitle “The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.” So, the title for the reading in this post offers students an opportunity to differentiate, and understand the difference between, an epidemic and a pandemic. The influenza of 1918 was certainly a pandemic–remember that the Greek root pan means all. This reading, in short, presents an opportunity to teach students the importance of using language with precision.
In other words, the big question this reading raises is: Was the influenza outbreak of 1918 an epidemic or a pandemic?
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.
Finally, here is the eighth and last lesson plan of “The Great Debaters” unit plan here on Mark’s Text Terminal. This is the assessment; I sought to create a document that measures thinking and memory rather than students’ ability to get the “right answer.” I wanted students to think about the readings, the movie, and, indeed, their own impressions and thinking about the unit’s content. This is my attempt (and I’ll concede happily and readily that it could use improvement, so by all means–and please!–chime in with your comments on this) to create a metacognitive assessment. I want students, again, to think about their thinking, especially in the way they used their prior knowledge of the real-life figures in the film better to understand the film itself.
I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun cognition; if the lesson goes into a second day–and I planned that it would–here is another on the noun metacognition. I would like students to walk away from this lesson with knowledge of metacognitive assessments, which I think, and research supports, are an important way of helping students to internalize and commit to memory the contents of this or any unit plan.
And, finally, here is the final assessment worksheet itself. I think there are any number of ways to use this. I prefer to conduct this as a group discussion and note-taking exercise during which students can range freely over the material and their reactions to it. Like just about everything else on this blog, this document is in Microsoft Word, so you can alter it to you and your students’ needs and circumstances.
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 the seventh lesson plan (of eight) of “The Great Debaters” unit plan here on Mark’s Text Terminal. This lesson describes and rationalizes the second day of watching the film. Here is another note-taking blank with which students can record their thoughts and recollections while watching the film.
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 the fifth lesson plan of the unit plan on the Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters. This lesson addresses the attempts of the Communist Party USA to enlist Americans of African descent in the class struggle in the United States. This is a complex and fraught topic, and I believe an entire academic career might be profitably spent on this topic. A good place to go to get a general sense of it is Richard Wright’s superlative memoir Black Boy. Because of Melvin Tolson’s involvement in labor organizing, and his possible membership in the Communist Party (a fact, I find, very hard to pin down), there are scenes in the film of Tolson (played, once again, by Denzel Washington) organizing farmers and farmworkers), I wanted students to understand the allure of the Communist Party to oppressed Black people.
Unsurprisingly, I open this lesson with this context clues worksheet on the noun socialism. In the event the lesson continues into a second day, here is another on the noun communism. Finally, here is the reading and comprehension worksheet at the center of 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.
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