Root Words: Sort by the Root

Ten word tiles sit at the top of this 2nd grade page: helplessly, replay, playfully, helper, playtime, helpfully, helpful, player, helpless and playful on the sheet shown. Below stand two walls of five dashed lines each, built on a foundation stone: play on the left, help on the right. The child reads each word and writes it on a line of the wall that stands on its root word. Five go on each wall. The words carry the prefix re- and the suffixes -ful, -less, -er and -ly, and several carry two endings at once.

A root word is the part that carries the meaning, and prefixes and suffixes are added to it to change that meaning. Seeing that helper, helpful, helpless and helplessly all stand on help is the second grade skill of using a known root to work out a new word. The walls make it visual: every word is literally built on its root. Replay is the tile to point at, because it is the only one where the root does not come first, and a child who sorts by the first letters alone will put it in the wrong place.

One sheet, ten words, two walls. Playtime is a compound word, two whole words joined, rather than a root with an ending, which is worth a sentence since compound words have a family of their own. This is the base page of the prefixes, suffixes and root words family; its faces use pictures, find the shared root, choose prefixes by meaning, build person words and fit a family into sentences.