Teaching students to find and spell the morphemes, or meaningful parts, of long words can help students to read those words.
The following resources are intended for instructors and tutors working with elementary students in Grades 3-5 who are experiencing difficulties reading long words. Unit 1 includes five lessons that focus on teaching suffixes and using the peel off strategy to pronounce and spell multimorphemic words.
Lesson 1. In the first lesson, the teacher will introduce the meanings of the suffixes -ity and -ful and demonstrate how to use the peel off strategy to break orally stated words into parts. Next, students will practice using the peel off strategy to read multimorphemic words with the suffixes -ity and –ful. Then, students will build words with the target suffixes. Finally, students will spell multimorphemic words with the –ity and -ful suffixes. After the lesson activities are completed, the teacher will assess students’ ability to read and spell multimorphemic words in a list before reading a connected text that contains the same words.