Participial Adjectives--Bored or Boring?

There's a difference between participial adjectives that end in -ed and those that end in -ing, as these cartoons show:

Practice Map-Reading Skills While Relaxing!

Do maps on the TABE reading tests scare you? Maybe you haven't spent a lot of time looking at different kinds of maps or studying how to interpret them. However, here is a fun and relaxing way to get used to working with maps and answering questions about what they show.
 

My suggestion: Do you like to color? Some adults get out colored pencils and color their own pictures while their children play with crayons and coloring books. It's very relaxing, and your kids may even want to join you. If you click on the link below, you will see many images that can help you practice reading and understanding maps, keys (legends), and distance scales. Click on a few map pictures and study them, or print them out, get some colored pencils, and try doing the activities and answering the questions. I have lots of colored pencils in my classroom in you want to try it!

LINK: Click on this link to print a map activity sheet or view it online

Below are some examples of map learning activities you will see when you click on the link above:

Practice Reading Charts and Tables

Try reading a table or chart without Teacher Bob's help!


My Suggestion: Click on the link below to practice reading bar graphs, pie charts, and tables. Answer the questions for each of the three activities, to make sure you are reading and understanding the charts correctly. The quiz page includes a dictionary for looking up unfamiliar words. It has a calculator if you need math help to answer a question.

LINK: Review Charts and Tables

Practice Reading a City Map

Click on the links below to practice using a city map:

LINK: Reading a City Map: Directions

LINK: Locating Buildings on a City Map

Sample questions:

Today in Class--Irregular Verb Quiz and Verb Tenses Review

Today in class we took a short quiz on irregular verbs. Then we started to review verb tense. We use simple tenses when we talk about a point in time (in the simple present tense, this point in time can be repeated regularly (I eat breakfast every morning) or it can be generally true at all times (I love ice cream). We use continuous tenses when we talk about an ongoing length of time. We viewed several time lines that show the differences between tenses.

1) Here is a timeline that tries to show the difference between simple tenses (past, present and future) and continuous or progressive tenses (past, present, and future).

LINK: Timeline--Simple Tenses Compared to Continuous Tenses

2) Another time line shows the difference between simple present and present continuous. It also shows how you can use simple past and past continuous together to say that something happened in the middle of something else (My mother phoned while I was cooking dinner.).

LINK: Tense Helper Timelines

3) If you feel very brave, the website Englishpage.com will tell you much more about the individual verb tenses than you ever wanted to know. We have not studied all of this material yet (such as active versus passive verbs). But if you want to know more, click on the link below to read detailed discussions of the verb tenses we have studied so far (you can read only what we have studied so far, or you can continue reading about more kinds of verbs). For each line of print, read the lessons in the Topics Covered column on the right, then look at the same line in the Exercises column on the left to try the verb tense exercise that goes with those lessons.

LINK: Verb Tenses at Englishpage.com


My Suggestion: Click on each of the three links above. If you find a timeline or explanation helpful, study it. Try reading some lessons and exercises at the third link, Englishpage.com. If it is too confusing, don't spend too much time on it--spend your study time with the links that help you the most.