Hello again! It’s Monday, Monday, First Grade Fun Day! And today I am going to tell you how I taught the advanced readers in the first grade classroom that I help out in weekly to make new words out of “old ones” by adding either a prefix or a suffix! I am sure that this lesson would work just fine for older children that need help with this concept as well.
This was really a very simple lesson. The children had already been introduced to the suffixes “ed,” “ing,” “er,” and the concept of adding an “s” or “es” to a word to make it plural. Most of these had been easily learned via the Sounds Fun Phonics cards and the CD/DVD that has a bunch of suffixes on it, though no prefixes.
Be sure to check in with me each Monday for some ideas and insights for teaching first graders!!
Since this particular group of children is SUPER bright and seems to catch on to everything just as quick as lightning, I decided to give them an extra special challenge and see if they could deal with some prefixes as well! So I showed them “re” and “un,” and explained that “re” meant “again,” as in the word “restart,” and that “un” means “not” as in “unwanted.” They all accepted this quite easily!
The children looked at the flash card of the word and then chose a prefix or suffix to change the old word into a new one.
Then I showed them some flashcards that I had printed out ahead of time. I got the words from the list of sight words that the school is supposed to learn. I just chose ones that looked like they could “take” a prefix or suffix, and printed them out. We read through the words once, and then I told them I was going to show them a word, and they were supposed to change the word by adding something to it to make a new word, and write it on the back of their laminated flash card with their smelly marker. After that, they could just wipe it off with their moist rag, since the markers are water soluble.
The children looked at the flash card of the word and then chose a prefix or suffix to change the old word into a new one.
After we did a few of these, it was obvious that a few of the children were simply copying what their peers were writing, so I asked the children to each write a different word! That really made them think, so I liked that activity!
After the children wrote their words, I had them read the words to me, and then sometimes we had to discuss which of their words were real words and which were nonsense words, but that’s okay! I think it lent itself to a good discussion!
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