| Can learning about morphemes be fun? |
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Research taster You can improve children’s spelling, vocabulary and their word attack strategies for interpreting novel words by boosting their awareness of morphemes. Teaching children about morphemes doesn’t have to be boring – you can use light-hearted word games. Games based on morphemes can include adding and subtracting morphemes, counting morphemes, guessing the meaning of invented words made with real morphemes in combinations that don’t exist and trying to discover the grammatical categories to which words with the same morphemes belong. Both high- and low- achieving children enjoy and can benefit from such games. 
Your evidence
You might like to review the resources currently available in your school to help teach children about morphemes. You could work with a colleague to review a variety of teaching resources and textbooks, noting the strengths and weaknesses of each resource in a table.
You could consider issues such as: does the material include information about morphemes? Does it enable pupils to explore and discover aspects of morphemes for themselves? How motivating is the material for pupils to use? Is it fun? Does it provide appropriate support to learners when they need it?
Moving forward
Having explored the resources already available in your school, you could review your use of these materials, choosing activities that pupils are likely to enjoy, as well as learn from. You might decide to work with colleagues to explore whether you could obtain additional materials, or create your own, for use with your pupils. Find out more  TLRP Research Briefing no. 14 Why morphemes are useful in primary school http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/no14_nunes.pdf The full project is The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and Numeracy in Key Stage 2 (2001 – 2004) by Prof. Terezina Nunes, Prof. Peter Bryant and Dr. Jane Hurry. The project website is at: http://www.tlrp.org/proj/phase11/phase2h.html Hurry, J. & Parker, M. (2004) The role of awareness in the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy at key stage 2, TLRP Annual Conference, (Cardiff, November). Available at: http://www.tlrp-archive.org/cgi-bin/search_oai_all.pl?pn=15&no_menu=1&short_menu=1 |
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