Hey there,

Happy Tuesday! Another week has come and gone, and I can't quite believe it. Like much of the country, we had a delayed start yesterday for cold temps (not too much snow here), but now we're hoping for an uneventful week! ❄️🧊

Today, I'm sharing some of the rationale for incorporating word study, strategies, and classroom-testing resources and activities I use. Don't have time to peruse? Here are two quick links to get you started!

🎯 The Rationale

Have you ever noticed that once students hit upper elementary, reading challenges start to look a little different?

It’s not that kids can’t decode anymore. Most can. The struggle shifts to understanding unfamiliar, academic, and content-heavy vocabulary. Suddenly, one unknown word can derail an entire paragraph. That’s where giving students becomes such a game changer.

Prefixes, suffixes, and roots give students the tools they need to attack and decode words and avoid guessing!

🤯 Ready for your mind to be blown? More than half of the English language comes from Greek or Latin roots. As students move into technical texts in upper elementary and beyond, Greek or Latin roots can account for closer to 75% of the vocabulary. This means that teaching just one root can unlock dozens of new words across reading, science, and social studies.

If you teach multilingual learners, this matters even more. Many of those same roots show up in Spanish, which means word study can instantly build confidence and comprehension.

📝 The Lessons

I shared my complete approach to teaching prefixes and suffixes in this blog post, along with classroom-tested ideas that are easy to implement (even if word study time feels tight). There is a MASSIVE free resource in here to get started. It includes:

• Anchor charts that actually stick
• Interactive notebooks students use​
• Book suggestions
• Low-prep independent practice
• Tons of real classroom examples

​👉 Click here to read the blog post and grab the FREE word study activities​

⭐ The Routines & Resources

If word study is something you want to strengthen this year, I also have a few ready-to-use resources that build directly on these strategies and save a ton of planning time because they are resources you can use over and over again to teach new roots with the same format.

⭐ Poem of the Week: One of my favorite routines is using a Poem of the Week to have students focus in on specific skills and concepts we are learning. I usually use these Prefix and Suffix Poems of the Week for review, and they are always a hit!

⭐ Word Study Task Cards: I always give a disclaimer that these aren't your average word study task cards. They are HEFTY and full of excellent content to really get kids thinking. I created these a few years ago and worked really hard to make this a rigorous resource that would really challenge students.

⭐ Morphology Minutes

This is one of my favorite morphology resources and includes SO much challenging content. It's all SOR-based, and instead of memorizing lists, students analyze how suffixes change word meanings and parts of speech through clear examples, word building, word sums, authentic application, and targeted practice.

⭐ Using Pictures to Teach Word Parts

This is one of my favorite ways to have students practice their morphology skills. They are challenged to use the given word part to label observations and inferences in an image, write definitions of words, and apply their knowledge in longer paragraphs. Kids just genuinely love this!

⭐ Interactive Prefix Practice

This is one of my favorite lessons once students have started to master prefixes and suffixes and word sums (I tend to recommend it after you use Morphology in a Minute a few times). It's best to see a visual of this, so hop over to my Instagram to see an old post where I explain exactly how we did this and included pictures, too!

• First, students had to read a paragraph with a bunch of missing un- and re- words. We brainstormed words that might go in the blanks based on context clues and what we know about these specific prefixes.
• Then, I gave them vocab cards with the meaning of the words. They created word sums for each and then began placing them into the story.
• Finally, they flipped them over to reveal the completed words and read the story.

As always, hit reply and tell me what’s been tricky with vocabulary or word study in your classroom. I read and appreciate every message.

Take care,

Mary