Hooked On English!: Ready-to-Use Activities for the English Curriculum, Grades 7-12 »

Jack Umstatter, M.A., M.Ed., ahs been a high school English teacher for the past 30 years in the public schools of West Islip and Cold Spring Harbor, New York. He has taught all levels of Secondary English including Honor and Advanced Placement Classes at Cold Spring Harbor High School, and also serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Dowling College, Oakdale, New York. Mr. Umstatter's other publications include Brain Games (1996), and Grammar Grabbers (2000).

This unique practical resource gives junior and senior high school English teachers 186 stimulating reproducible activities that can be used at any time to review and reinforce important concepts across the English curriculum in a challenging and entertaining way.
The activities have been tested successfully with students of varying abilities and include an exciting variety of crossword puzzles, word jumbles, wordsearches, magic squares, cryptoquotes, word scrambles, matching columns, fill-ins, and more.

For easy use, all materials are printed in a big 8-1/4" x 11" lay flat format that folds flat for photocopying and are organized into the following seven sections:

Section One offers 30 reproducible activities focusing on parts of speech, phrases and clauses, for example, "A Noun and Its Uses," "Animals and Adverbs," and "The 25 Prepositional Phrases."
Section Two contains 25 worksheets featuring words that are often confused, irregular verbs, modifiers, punctuation, and agreement, including "Positive... Comparative... Superlative," "Making Them All Agree," and "Active and Passive Voices."
Section Three gives you 32 ready-to-use activities that expand students' word skills, such as "Six Common Types of Analogies," "Words with Some Smash!" (onomatopoeic words), and "Latin and Greek Stems."
In Section Four you'll find 24 activities focusing on spelling, homophones, plurals, possessives, punctuation and proofreading, for example, "Have You Ever Had Dessert in the Desert?", "Learning from the Grate Depression," and "British or American?"
The 29 activities in Section Five cover topics such as sentence construction, transitional words, brainstorming, and speech writing. Examples include "Moving Along with Transitional Words," "Combining Sentences," and "The Style of the Speech."
Section Six features 23 activities on topics like literary and newspaper terms, literary characters, authors and reading self-assessment, for example, "Literary Terms Crossword," "A Shakespearean Sonnet," and "Are We What We Read?"
Section Seven provides 23 activities on topics such as eponyms, idioms, expressions, clich?s, and word usage, including "A Herculean Task," "Shake a Leg and Pour Your Heart Out," and "Two on the Aisle" (theater terms).
Also included are complete answer keys, ready to be copied for student self-checking if you wish, and "The Internet Connection," a special appendix giving you access to useful sites about authors, lesson plans, literature, writing, and research.
In short, HOOKED ON ENGLISH! places at your fingertips an unparalleled store of stimulating reproducible activities to help your students learn and enjoy English... all ready to use "as is" for homework, tests, quizzes, extra credit, discussions, cooperative learning, research, or any other purpose you see fit