If you’re familiar with the Wordier teaching style, you’ll know that we’ve been teaching morphemes (i.e. root words, prefixes and suffixes) to our students for many years now.
Our founder became a convert when she realised that just a few vocab lessons enabled her students to break down tricky words with ease. Without prompting, these savvy kids were breaking down words like “monosyllabic” into their morphemes (i.e. “mono-“, “syll” – from “syllable”, – and “-ic”) and deciphering the meanings independently.
But even as long-time morpheme converts, we learnt a statistic that shocked even us recently:
(If, like us, you like a good research study, you can check out the full background on this figure here.)
This means that rather than memorising hundreds or thousands of definitions, your child can simply learn that “spect” means “look” or “scribe” means “write”, for example. Suddenly thousands of new words will make more sense to them!
Couple this with learning a few common prefixes and vocabulary will become infinitely easier for your child.
To get started with morphemes, head over to our YouTube channel. Here, our “5 Words in 5 Minutes” series talks you through several of those common roots.
You can also watch one of our videos below. This video focuses on common “tain”, “tent” and “ten” words.
Click here to explore the full playlist.
You can learn even more common morphemes with our free Morphemes Cheat Sheet. Click below to download.
When you’re ready to go further with morphemes, head over to our shop where the Wordier workbook features over 200 words taught using pictures, morphemes and a variety of vocabulary activities.
