Compound Detective: Which Six of Twelve Words Are Made of Two?

Twelve picture-word cards sit in a dashed bank at the top of this 2nd grade compound-words page: kitchen, jellyfish, keyboard, bookshelf, necklace, donkey, pumpkin, earthworm, penguin, watermelon, potato, mushroom. Six of them are made of two words and six only look long. Under the bank are six numbered rows, each with two handwriting rules joined by a plus sign. The child circles the six compound words in the bank and writes the two parts of each one on a row: jelly + fish, key + board, book + shelf, neck + lace, earth + worm, water + melon. The other six — kitchen, donkey, pumpkin, penguin, potato, mushroom — stay uncircled.

Is it made of two words? is a harder question than it sounds, because long words all look the same on the page. A detective has to take the word apart and ask whether both pieces are real words that add up to the meaning: jelly and fish do, and a jellyfish is a fish-shaped jelly; don and key do not make a donkey. That test, rather than length or the presence of a familiar chunk, is what the page trains, and the six foils are chosen because they tempt — pumpkin, penguin and potato all begin with something that sounds like a word. The teacher asks for the two parts out loud before anything is circled; a child who cannot name two real parts has found a foil.

The page prints on one sheet and is finished when six rows are full and six bank words are untouched. It is the judgment face of the family: use it after the picture-plus-picture page and the split-the-compound page, where every word on the paper is a compound, and before the word-web page. Necklace and mushroom are the two cards that provoke the best classroom argument, and the answer key settles it.