Our Widening Word Families activity allows students to demonstrate their understanding of how to build words by adding affixes. The science of reading has proven that teaching morphology concepts, such as prefixes and suffixes, helps improve students’ reading and writing.

To complete this task, students will create word families by adding prefixes and suffixes to words from a text of your choice. They are encouraged to utilise the prefix and suffix checklist at the bottom of each page.

To cater for the various needs of students in your class, we have included two versions of this resource:

• Version 1 requires students to locate a base word in the text, which they will add affixes to.
• Version 2 requires students to locate a base word in the text, which they will add affixes to. They will then compose a paragraph that includes as many words from the word family as possible.