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OVERVIEW: Users Manuals for Weekly Text Worksheets on Mark’s Text Terminal.CUT & PASTE for this OVERVIEWMark’s Text Terminal: Word Root Worksheets Users’ Manual If you type “pattern recognitions and evolution” into an internet search engine (particularly here: ), you will find a number of articles extolling the human brain as a “pattern recognition machine” on the same order as the bar code scanners at your supermarket (themselves, of course, a product, along with the codes they recognize, of the human brain). So, it makes basic sense, when setting out to assist students in building their vocabularies, to use the brain’s pattern recognition mechanism in the service of this task. These word root worksheets endeavor to do just that. These lessons use Greek and Latin word roots to help students recognize patterns in words by knowledge of just one word root, and therefore to understand all branches of that root, to extend this metaphor a bit further (indeed, the aim I post on the chalkboard is: How do we use word roots to “grow” words?).Each worksheet includes a clear description of the task, which in any case is quite simple: students are presented with a Greek or Latinate word root at the top of the page. The second section of the document lists words that are derived from the root. Using a collegiate dictionary—these worksheets are for high school students, and high school is as good a time as any to learn to use a collegiate dictionary; moreover, most of these worksheets contain at least one word that students will need a collegiate dictionary to find—students will define all the words in the list. As they work through the word list, they naturally work toward inferring, from the definitions they find, the basic meaning of that word root.After students complete their word definitions and infer the meaning of the root from them, if time permits (I’ve found that one way to assess struggling students’ performance in class is how long, over time, it takes them to complete their definitions; generally, over the course of the year, the time students require to finish contracts, sometimes precipitously), you may want to ask them to apply their newly acquired knowledge of these words and the root that forms them. One means for this is to ask students—and the worksheets are formatted with a section for this work—to compose several sentences using any of that worksheet’s words. This gives students an opportunity, and for you to assist them in same, to identify and classify these words further, by their parts of speech. You can guide this sentence writing with coaching on what parts of speech go where in a clearly written, grammatically complete expository sentence, and to assist students in correcting basic errors in English usage.As with most of the work I’ve designed to assist struggling students develop more advanced and sophisticated literacy skills, I’ve often wondered how these word root worksheets could be further adapted, enhanced or synthesized with other kinds of literacy work to make them more cogent. Might you have any thoughts on this? Please advise via the comments link.Finally, a word about asterisks in worksheets at Mark’s Text Terminal. I’ve read in a couple of different places that when kids see their own names in academic work, they are more likely to learn from that work. On the level of common sense, that seems easy to understand. Still, my own curiosity compels me to look more deeply into this question, and at some point in the future, I will research, compose, and publish an essay on Mark’s Text Terminal that explores this question in depth. In the meantime, however, users should be aware that they must replace the asterisks in the sentences on these worksheets with subject nouns and appropriate pronouns.Mark’s Text Terminal: Homophone Worksheets Users’ Manual Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, now in its 11th edition (and which ought to be the standard reference dictionary for high schools), defines homophone as one or more words pronounced alike but different in meaning or derivation or spelling (as the words to, too and two). One of the first homophone worksheets I wrote was for a student struggling with the to, too and two quandary.Over time, I expanded my portfolio of these. Like much of the work you’ll find among my do-now worksheets, homophone worksheets are highly structured; they provide a familiar and therefore predictable opportunity for struggling learners to participate in class, as well as try new ways of dealing with language. Using them is quite straightforward: each homophone is defined at the top of the worksheet; I ask students to read the sentence, select the appropriate word for the cloze blank, and call on the next student, who deals with the next sentence. Most days, by the end of one of these worksheets, students are adequately settled to begin a longer lesson that demands more of their attention.Although these are do-now worksheets, I can see possibilities for expanding them. These are some of the easiest worksheets to raise into a learning scaffold. I wrote five of each, and you have numbers one (simplest) and five (most complicated). The other three cover the range between one and five, and provide the intermediate steps between the bottom and top of the scaffold only in terms of using the words themselves. The next step up the scaffold would call upon students to write their own sentences using the homophones under study properly, and thereby allow them to apply their knowledge. You can assess their understanding of these words’ use in as many ways as you can think of to use these materials. If a student is using these words properly in a sentence-writing segment, then you’ve arguably done your job.Finally, a word about asterisks in worksheets at Mark’s Text Terminal. I’ve read in a couple of different places that when kids see their own names in academic work, they are more likely to learn from that work. On the level of common sense, that seems easy to understand. Still, my own curiosity compels me to look more deeply into this question, and at some point in the future, I will research, compose, and publish an essay on Mark’s Text Terminal that explores this question in depth. In the meantime, however, users should be aware that they must replace the asterisks in the sentences on these worksheets with subject nouns and appropriate pronouns.Mark’s Text Terminal: Focus on One Word Worksheets Users’ Manual In my experience, following Daniel Willingham’s dictum that “thought is the parent to memory,” one of the most effective ways of introducing new vocabulary words to students is to embed those words in context that registers with them. Unfortunately, also in my experience (which is exclusively in urban schools), I cannot take anything for granted when it comes to students’ prior knowledge. English language learners often have a soft understanding of American English idioms, and students in general lack understanding of many of the abstract expressions, references and allusions that have so long been part of social and cultural discourse in the United States. You may recognize this as what E.D. Hirsch has called “Cultural Literacy.”Therefore, creating context for this kind of exercise is tricky. I survey students on their cultural preferences; I also pay attention to their personalities, communication styles and word choices in conversations. This provides me, mostly, with the tools to write context that will allow the word under study to stand upright and have some inferential meaning, at least initially, for students. At the same time, I’ve watched a lot of “Family Guy” and “American Dad” and “South Park,” which has not always been rewarding. Still, it’s pretty easy, say, to introduce students to the word petulant by saying “Stewie Griffin is petulant.” Another way to animate relatable context is to remain au courant on the names and basic biographies of prominent entertainers.However, there are occasions, especially when I want to build vocabulary in a social studies or English unit, when I’ll adapt these and write context particular to that unit’s content, e.g. the Renaissance or the use of metaphor in fiction writing, that reinforces domain-specific concepts, skills or methods. Mostly though, these worksheets present context that is relatively specific to students who watch a lot of television, keep up with popular music, particularly Hip Hop and R&B, and other than texts from friends on their smartphones, read very, very little. I designed these as do now exercises to begin a class lesson, settle students, and get them thinking. In terms of method, I teach these in a variety of classes. In integrated co-teaching classes, I coordinate with the subject teacher. If he or she is spending a week on China, for example, I’ll teach the words filial and piety so that the students gain the tools to grasp this moderately complicated and abstract concept from Confucian philosophy. As a general rule, I try to involve students in all aspects of their own educations. Before the cue (bell or tone or whatever) to begin the class, I ask a student to hand out the worksheets. After the cue, I ask the class for a volunteer to serve as class linguist. That person uses the latest edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Calling on one another, students read through the series of five sentences. Then, they begin the real work of inferring the meaning of the word and defining it; here the linguist is the arbiter of the definition, and I ask the the linguist, when a student defines the word closely enough, if he or she has heard the definition. If so, then the linguist dictates the definition to me, which I then write on the board for students to copy. If the linguist asks his or her fellow students to think harder and arrive at a clearer definition—since you’re guiding this, you can discourage or encourage this as you wish, by pushing for a more cogent definition or accepting the proffered definition—I ask students the kind of Socratic questions that will lead them to hew closer to the word’s meaning in the context it is articulated. If Daniel Willingham’s first demonstration of memory (search the Text Terminal for a lesson on this) holds true, then the thought students put into remembering these words should aid retention. Sentence-writing exercises would further reinforce retention and understanding, and provide teachers with a mean to assess understanding of the word’s meaning as well as its part of speech and therefore its role in a sentence. What else?In fact, let me give Professor Willingham, with an excerpt from his book The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017) a little more space here to explain the importance of context in understanding new words and building a vocabulary from them:“Looking words up in a dictionary will be of limited use—not useless, but, but we must acknowledge that it will be just one context in which to understand the word’s meaning, and it’s possible that the student will misunderstand the definition. Explicit instruction of new words is more likely to be successful the way teachers usually implement it, with multiple examples and with the requirement that students use each word in different contexts. There is a good evidence that students do learn vocabulary this way.In addition to consistent vocabulary instruction, teachers can make it more likely that students will learn words they encounter in context. They can give students pointers that will help them use context for figure out an unfamiliar word. For example, students can learn to use the clues in the sentence about the unknown word’s part of speech, to use the setting described in the text to constrain the word’s meaning, and to use the tone of the text to help constrain meaning.”Finally, a word about asterisks in worksheets at Mark’s Text Terminal. I’ve read in a couple of different places that when kids see their own names in academic work, they are more likely to learn from that work. On the level of common sense, that seems easy to understand. Still, my own curiosity compels me to look more deeply into this question, and at some point in the future, I will research, compose, and publish an essay on Mark’s Text Terminal that explores this question in depth. In the meantime, however, users should be aware that they must replace the asterisks in the sentences on these worksheets with subject nouns and appropriate pronouns.Mark’s Text Terminal: Parsing Sentences Worksheets Users’ ManualSome years ago I worked in a school that had subscribed to a scripted reading program. In one part of the script, students were assigned a list of vocabulary words, which they were expected to use to compose sentences, as homework. All but a few students returned work in which their vocabulary words were literally used wrongly—i.e. nouns were used as verbs, verbs as nouns, etc. Needless to say, students turned in ungrammatical facsimiles of Noam Chomsky’s famous grammatically complete but semantically meaningless sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”So, it was clear that students didn’t know the parts of speech, not to mention the elements of a sentence. So I set out to design some workable curricula to teach the parts of speech, and, by extension, good writing. These Do Now exercises, which are intended to open a lesson and get students settled, are some of the first thing I wrote to teach writing. Unlike some of the parsing or diagramming activities—Kitty Burns Florey’s Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences (New York: Harcourt, 2006) comes to mind--which can be quite complicated for struggling learners, these worksheets call upon students simply to read the sentence and identify whichever part of speech the worksheet asks them to deal with. To extend this a bit, you can ask how the student knows, say, which word is the adverb in a sentence: What verb does it modify? Is it modifying an adjective? Which? Or is this adverb modifying another adverb? Exactly what other words can adverbs modify?In my experience, this kind of structured activity, repeated but varied—you could do a different part of speech for each day of the week, or mix them up in some other way—sometimes brings even the most reticent students into the discussion. Teaching the parts of speech to struggling learners, particularly in a structured and relatively predictable setting, is one step up the scaffold of literacy.Finally, a word about asterisks in worksheets at Mark’s Text Terminal. I’ve read in a couple of different places that when kids see their own names in academic work, they are more likely to learn from that work. On the level of common sense, that seems easy to understand. Still, my own curiosity compels me to look more deeply into this question, and at some point in the future, I will research, compose, and publish an essay on Mark’s Text Terminal that explores this question in depth. In the meantime, however, users should be aware that they must replace the asterisks in the sentences on these worksheets with subject nouns and appropriate pronouns.Mark’s Text Terminal: Learning Supports Users’ ManualThe first thing a teacher ought to do for struggling learners, which may be the best thing, I strongly believe, is to assist them in gaining insight into and understanding of their personal epistemic styles, i.e. in knowing how they know what they know. A struggling student who learn how he or she learns, not how a classroom teacher thinks they should learn, stands a pretty good shot at attaining good educational outcomes, as the bureaucrats like to say.So, to that end, I’ve written a range of learning supports for social studies and English language arts topics. If students can think of teacher-authored learning supports—or better yet, reference books, indexes, databases and the like—as tools, then they can learn how that tools is best used in their own construction of knowledge. In general, learning supports don’t require any special explanation in terms of use. Teachers will be able to draw conclusions quickly about where, how and when they want to deploy these materials. That said, I think these, or some of them at least, are strong candidates for adaptation by way of either simplification, expansion, or contraction. For my use, these accompany, particularly in English language arts, at least one lesson and often several units within a lesson.If nothing else, especially if you teach English, you might find these handy to have around. ................
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