As teachers all know, kids don’t learn everything on the first try.  With repetition and practice, they gradually gain a better understanding of the concepts and gradually pick up more and more of the facts.  This seems especially true with vocabulary instruction.  There are so many little details to learn – prefixes, suffixes, and roots for example.

Coming up with a plan that provides plenty of repetition and practice, and still keeps the kids attention, can be a challenge, so it helps to have plenty of resources on hand at the beginning of a new topic.  I guess that’s why teachers are masters at searching out free activities and ideas that they can use or adapt to build activities of their own.

A few kinds of activities that I especially like are foldables that can be saved in students’ notebooks, fun puzzles or games, and task cards.  Since I’ve written a lot about task cards before, I’ll concentrate, this time, on a foldable and one fun activity sheet.

You can download both activities for free here:  Affixes and Roots – Foldable and Color Coding Activity.

Foldable Brochure

What I especially like about certain foldables is that they serve a double purpose.  They provide the much-needed practice and they make great notes to save in student notebooks.  This foldable brochure works great because both covers fold forward, leaving the center back blank for gluing into notebooks.

In the foldable, I ask students too define the words prefix and suffix, choose words with each type of affix, define the specific affixes, use the words in sentences, and define the words.  For suffixes, I also ask them to identify the part of speech.  Just for fun, I also provided spaces for students to create their own icons to represent prefix and suffix.

Here you can see the inside of the brochure.  I include a student direction sheet with a selection of words for students to chose from.

Color Coding Activity

When the note-taking is done and it’s time for fun practice activities, there are so many good choices.  Here is one that I like.  It’s a color-coding activity with some roots and some words with roots in the blank areas of the design.  The questions, or clues, are at the bottom of the page along with the color code.  Students will enjoy answering by coloring in the design, and as a bonus for teachers, this one is a breeze to check.  Just compare the colored design on the answer key to the students design and see if they match!

Students could easily check each other’s work first, providing an opportunity to make corrections before turning in their papers.

Related Resources

If you would like to see more foldables, games, and other fun activities for prefixes, suffixes, or Latin and Greek roots. check these out.