ALT Graphic Organizers for Morphology Instruction

ALT Morpheme Practice Graphic Organizer Help students understand new words by using the word’s component morphemes to derive meaning. This graphic organizer guides students to identify and define individual morphemes in a longer word. Then, they piece the word back together again, using their understanding of morphemes to derive a definition of the whole word.

ALT Morphemic Analysis Graphic Organizer This graphic organizer helps students break down words into their roots, prefixes, and suffixes and record the meaning of each. Then, students combine the individual parts and infer the meaning of the whole word. Finally, students test whether the word makes sense in its original context.

ALT Word Building Graphic Organizer By applying the Word Building Strategy, students combine morphemes to create new words and meanings. Through the strategy, students apply their understanding of how word parts contribute to meaning and grammatical function. The Word Building Strategy consists of three basic steps: building new words with morpheme cards, recording the words in the graphic organizer, and using the new words in written sentences.

ALT What are high-utility morphemes? High-utility morphemes are word parts that appear frequently in academic vocabulary across content areas (i.e., English language arts, social studies, science, and math). utility “to use” “state of” High-utility morphemes are: -frequent: They appear often across texts students use in secondary school -transferable: They appear across multiple content areas -supportive of comprehension: They help students unlock the meaning of complex academic vocabulary

ALT The IRRC’s Morpheme Lab includes free lists of high-frequency morphemes across English Language Arts, social studies, science, and math, based on research conducted by Lane et al. (2019)

ALT Visit the IRRC’s Morpheme Lab to see the full lists and learn how to incorporate explicit instruction of high-utility morphemes into your classroom!