Exploring Language

Lesson 1 Vocabulary: Breaking Real Nouns into Morphemes

 

After doing Lesson 1.1 on analyzing nonsense words, you can move on to real words. The goal here is simply to break words into their meaningful parts, their morphemes. You can do this, of course, with any category, but it will be easier to limit the focus at this point on nouns, and the kinds of suffixes that nouns take, so it’s probably best to offer a list rather than have the students generate their own words, at least at first. Here are some ideas. You can use others (that may related to topics you’re covering in your classrooms).

 

cats = cat + s

probability = probabil + ity (probable)

freedom = free + dom

happiness = happi (happy) + ness

wreckage = wreck + age

runner = runn (run) + er

 

Some of these examples illustrate how spelling can change with the addition of some of the affixes (affix is a cover term for suffix and prefix), so you can decide if you want to detour here to focus on spelling. This lesson on TeachLing is good, but it's on breaking words of all different parts of speech into their morphemes, so if you’re trying to limit the scope to just nouns, you will want to alter the TeachLing lesson. It could, however, be useful as a model.

 

Here is this lesson as a pdf.