“When was the Koran written? It existed first in oral form as series of revelations recited by the prophet Muhammad (570-632), founder of Islam. His followers wrote down or committed to memory the individual surahs, or chapters, but these were not collected in authoritative form until about 650.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“The author of this book should be neutered and locked away forever.”
San Juan County Record
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
Here is a reading on Mark Twain and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. It’s a nice little biography and could serve as a concise but informative introduction to this great American writers for young readers.
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: here is a lesson plan on Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher” along with its reading and worksheet. You’ll notice that the comprehension questions are sparse and simple. However, as with almost everything you will encounter on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Microsoft Word documents which can be exported to a word processor of your preference, or manipulated for your use as it is.
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 an independent practice worksheet on Hinduism. I don’t know about your school district, but in the years I taught in New York City, understanding the South Asian civilization (s) was a key part of the global studies curriculum.
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.
“Magic Realism: Deriving from the metaphysical period of Giorgio de Chirico (see METAPHYSICAL ART) and related to surrealism, magic realism translates everyday experiences into disturbing images by curious juxtapositions of sharply painted elements. Balthus and Peter Blume are magic realists. Also called precise realism, sharp focus realism.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Moving right along, here is a lesson plan on the Crime and Puzzlement case “The Good Ship Contessa.”
I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on perhaps the best-known of Aesop’s Fables, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Here is the scan of the illustrations and questions with which to conduct the investigation of this case. Finally, here is the typescript of the answer key.
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.
Given current history, now seems like a good time to post this reading on autoimmune disease and its accompanying 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.
The amount of research on reading is voluminous. Even after reading what I consider and exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) amount of this material across a period of 15 years, I still barely scratched the surface of this body of literature. At the classroom level, however, teaching practice demands keen attention to two things: decoding–i.e. recognizing the correspondence between letters and their sounds, known as phonemic awareness, and comprehension–i.e. understanding the meanings of words and applying that understanding, in synthesis, to the entire body of a text to understand it.
English is a tough language to decode. One person who recognized this and wanted to do something about it was the Irish playwright and Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was sufficiently concerned about the odd vagaries of English spelling that he actually bequeathed money in his estate for spelling reform. Indeed, there is a form of orthography known as the Shavian Alphabet (Aside: Shavian is both an adjective and a noun meaning, basically, related to George Bernard Shaw and his writings.)
In any case, one of the well-known representations of the challenges of English phonics, often erroneously (it first appeared, apparently, in a letter from Charles Ollier to Leigh Hunt) attributed to Shaw, is the word ghoti. It is possible, using English phonics, to pronounce this word as fish: take the gh from tough (i.e. f), the o from the plural women (i.e. short i), and the ti from action (i.e. sh).
Over the years, when I had a few minutes left in a class period, generally at the beginning of the school year, I would trot this out for the struggling readers and English language learners I served. After explaining–in summary of course–much of the foregoing in this essay, I would point out to students that if they struggled with English phonics and their representation in orthography, they were in very good company: George Bernard Shaw, Nobel prizewinning author whose plays are still routinely performed today.
This year, I finally wrote out this lesson plan on ghoti for use in a full class period. Here is the accompanying worksheet and the teacher’s copy of same. I added a few words, which I grabbed somewhere along the line. Now it’s yours if you can use 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.
“When did the Iranian government condemn writer Salman Rushdie to death? Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence against the author of The Satanic Verses on February 15, 1989. Rushdie has been in hiding since.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
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