Morphology refers to the study of meaningful word parts (morphemes) like prefixes, suffixes, and roots. Spike’s Sight Words helps children understand that words can be broken down into smaller units of meaning, and that these units can be combined to form new words. This understanding is crucial for building vocabulary, reading fluency, and spelling skills. Sight words, on the other hand, are high-frequency words that children are encouraged to memorize for faster and more accurate reading. Spike’s Sight Words provides resources for both morphology and sight word instruction, supporting students’ reading development.
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Morphology:Morphology focuses on the structure and meaning of words. It helps students understand how prefixes, suffixes, and root words combine to form new words and change their meaning. For example, knowing that “un-” is a prefix that means “not” helps a student understand the word “unhappy”.
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Morphological Awareness:This is the ability to consciously recognise, comprehend, and manipulate these small units of meaning. Understanding that “able” can be added to words like “move” to create “movable” is an example of morphological awarenessBenefits of Morphology:Understanding morphology can significantly improve vocabulary, reading fluency, and spelling skills. It helps students decode unfamiliar words and build a stronger foundation for reading comprehension.
It is hard to over estimate the importance of reading on an individual’s access to knowledge, prosperity, health, and social engagement. Yet, unlike spoken language, which is acquired by all typically-developing children, reading is a learned skill that requires years of practice and formal instruction.
Individuals who can consciously recognise, comprehend, and manipulate these small units of meaning are engaging in morphological awareness. In other words,
morphological awareness is an understanding that prefixes and suffixes can be added or taken away to change the meaning of a word.
Morphological awareness provides a powerful tool for improving many areas of literacy:
Vocabulary comprehension
Reading aloud
Spelling
Phonological awareness
Reading comprehension
Morpheme Types
There are two major types of morphemes: free morphemes and bound morphemes. The smallest example is made up of one of each of these types of morphemes.
Small – is a free morpheme
-est – is a bound morpheme
Free Morphemes
A free morpheme is a morpheme that occurs alone and carries meaning as a word. Free morphemes are also called unbound or freestanding morphemes eg,Frigid, are, Must.
Lexical Morphemes
Lexical morphemes carry the content or meaning of a message eg,Stand, Stage, Compact.
Functional Morphemes
As opposed to lexical morphemes, functional morphemes do not carry the content of a message. These are the words in a sentence that are more functional, meaning that they coordinate the meaningful words eg, With, There, And
Bound Morphemes
Unlike lexical morphemes, bound morphemes are those that cannot stand alone with meaning. Bound morphemes must occur with other morphemes to create a complete word.
Inflectional Morphemes
When a bound morpheme is attached to a word but does not change the root word’s grammatical category, it is an inflectional morpheme. These morphemes simply modify the root word in some way eg, Fireplace + s = fireplaces
