Pick It Apart: How to Teach Word Parts and Why

Un. Re. In. Dis. Learn the meaning of these four prefixes, and you've just unlocked the meaning to over 1500 new words. It's no wonder vocabulary development experts, including Patricia M. Cunningham of the What Really Matters series, stress the importance of learning your prefixes and suffixes.

Think of it. Teach un and suddenly your students can read and understand uncommon, undo, undecided. It's unbelievable. When you consider the efficiency this brings to vocabulary instruction, you may wonder why more curriculum isn't focused on teaching word parts. Unfortunately, as Cunningham points out, teaching word parts often just isn't "very engaging or motivating--for teacher or students."

Until we tackled the task, that is. Imagine Learning is proud to introduce three new activities dedicated not only to teaching word parts but also to exciting and motivating your students. Learn more about the research behind these activities and how we mixed martial arts with some serious affix action.

Word Chop: Introduction to Prefixes and Suffixes
In her book What Really Matters in Vocabulary, Cunningham explains that the main goal in teaching word parts is to "help your students become morphologically sophisticated.... When they come to a big unknown word in their reading, they should ask themselves the key question: 'Does this new word have any parts I know?'"

In this activity, Nick, a character from Imagine Museum, transforms into a martial arts master to help students figure out a good strategy to read and understand challenging words. Nick teaches a four-step strategy to reading big words, including "chopping" the word into smaller parts and checking the context.

Fix It Up: Use Prefixes and Suffixes
Now that students know the Word Chop strategy, they're ready to make some words of their own. In this activity, students learn the meaning of new affixes and try creating new words with them.

Of course, not every word can take every affix. As Cunningham points out, "knowing the opposite meaning of im helps you build meaning for impatient and improbably, but not for imagine or immense." Nick steps in again to explain this concept and show students that there are some exceptions to the rule.

After students create a few new words with an affix, they put these words into a paragraph to complete a funny story.

Affix Action: Practice Prefixes and Suffixes
This is where students really get into affixes. They create words from a list of prefixes, base words, and suffixes in order to answer a prompt. For every word they answer correctly, students choose a martial arts move they want to see Nick perform. At the end of the activity, Nick performs each move in order, creating a unique (and often silly) routine.