Categories: Education

Teaching Students About Suffixes, Prefixes and Other Word Parts

This is a lesson plan that has been shared from teacher to teacher for years. No one knows the origin of where it came from. Perhaps a creative teacher thought it up in her spare time. I have taken the simple idea of the lesson plan and revamped it for this generation of students. The lesson plan involves breaking words down into their prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Also, it involves taking known parts of words and defining them to fit into the whole definition. An example of this would be the word psychology. Psych means mind or brain, and ology means the study of. So psychology means the study of the mind.

The word that the children work with is probably one of the longest, and most complicated scientific words in the English language. The word is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Usually, teachers merely write the word on the board, and have the children break it down into parts. I changed this plan up a bit

I divide my children into groups of eight, as the word can be broken down into eight parts. So if my class has 24 students, each group has three students in it. I write the eight word part on index cards. The cards go in a box for the students to choose from the index cards. Their job is to choose a card with a part of the word. The word is broken down into the following parts; pneumono, ultra, micro, scopic, silico, volcano, coni, and osis.

Each group must research the meaning, using the dictionary, their best guess, or they can search the internet. The group must decide on their first choice of an answer. They are to also choose a second choice in case their first choice is wrong. Each group chooses a spokesman. After about five minutes, I have each spokesman for each of the eight groups come to the front. They have by then written down on an 8 by 10 piece of paper their root word on the top and the definition on the bottom. They have also written their second choice on the back of the same paper. The students line up in order that the roots appear in the word. We read the word by parts, then we read the definition. If they are wrong, the group leader has to use the second choice of a definition and we repeat the process again. Usually by the second time, all eight word parts are correctly defined.

The true definition of each root and of the words is included here. Pneumono is related to the lungs. Ultra means super. Micro means small. Scopic means relating to viewing with an instrument. Silico is defined as a mineral silicon. Volcano means eruption in the earth from which molten rock issues. Coni means dust. And finally osis means diseased condition. So know that we have broken it down, even though it is a detailed definition, the students have a better idea what the word means.

The last part of the lesson plan is to have the students go back to their groups, and come up with a simplified definition. Now that they know each word part, they can guess the shortened, abbreviated definition. The majority of the times, they are correct.

So what is the definition of this long word? Pneumonoultramicrosocpicsilicovolcanoconiosis is defined as a disease of the lungs caused by habitual inhalation of very fine silicon dust particles. So how does this lesson plan apply to instruction?

This helps the students to learn a new strategy that they can use when encountering difficult words, particularly in science. Chances are, they already know a part of the word, and can figure it out by looking up the remaining prefixes, roots, or suffixes that they don’t know. Rather than just reading on through a word they don’t understand, the students now have a new technique that they can use to increase their comprehension of what they read.

As all good teachers know, comprehension is the keystone of reading. Next time your students or home schooled children have difficulty understanding the meaning of a long and difficult word, show them how to break the word down into parts. Their comprehension will drastically improve once they learn this strategy.