Root Words in Sentences

Two panels fill this 3rd grade page, each built around one root word on a stone: joy in the first and sleep in the second. Above each stone sit four words from its family, enjoy, enjoyment, joyful and joyfully in the first panel and sleepiness, sleepily, sleepy and sleeper in the second. Below each stone are four sentences with a gap, and the child writes each of the four words into the sentence it fits. On the sheet shown the sentences include The dog jumped ... when we came home, We read the funny story for pure ..., and Our baby is a light ... and wakes at every sound.

Knowing a word family is one step; using the right member in a sentence is the harder one, and it depends on grammar as much as meaning. Joyful describes, joyfully tells how, enjoyment names a thing and enjoy is an action, and each sentence only accepts one of them. That makes this page a quiet grammar lesson inside a vocabulary page: the ending tells the child what job the word will do. A light sleeper is the sentence most likely to need talking about.

One sheet, two families, eight sentences. Each panel uses all four of its words once, so the last gap in each panel can be checked by elimination. Sleepiness carries two endings at once, -y and then -ness, which is worth pointing out as the longest word on the page. This is the top of the prefixes, suffixes and root words family and a natural place to ask children to write a sentence of their own for one more word from either family.