Customer Reviews

Vocabulary Through Morphemes: Suffixes, Prefixes, And Roots For Intermediate Grades CD, Book, & Reproducibles

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As a literacy consultant and instructor for several CA Reading Specialist credential courses, I have reviewed many vocabulary programs for grades 4- 8 and in my opinion, this is the BEST! It happens to be one of the most cost effective programs as well. Nothing consumable, no student editions to buy.

Everything needed for classroom use is included; the teacher can photocopy the practice pages, assessments, and games from the black-line masters that are provided along with the author's permission to copy for classroom use.

A PC- and Mac-compatible CD is included in the back of the teacher's manual which contains complete teaching instructions and answers. The CD is the heart of the program and contains a sequence of 82 easy-to-use and very effective lessons. In just 15-20 minutes a day, the entire sequence of lessons could be taught in one school year. The package also includes black-line masters for practice pages and related word games. Everything is clear and easy to follow; both teachers and students will enjoy it!

By noting how the same morpheme or word part (prefix, suffix, or root) maintains its meaning in a wide variety of words, students learn to ascribe that meaning wherever they encounter the same morpheme. Students learn how various morphemes affect the function of a word. For example, the suffix "-ion" usually denotes things, like instruction and function, while the suffix "-ian" usually denotes people, like mathematician and Egyptian. This knowledge helps not only with vocabulary but with comprehension and spelling. Students learn not only the hundreds of words used in the program ~ and REALLY learn them, not just until the test is over ~ they are also able to figure out the meaning of tens of thousands of unfamiliar words as they are encountered in textbooks, literature, on achievement tests or state standards tests, and even on college-entry tests like the SAT. This is learning that will stay with them and help them forever!

The lessons are laid out in a way that helps our often-confusing English language make much more sense. I think that completing the lessons in this book is tantamount to taking a course in Latin and Greek languages, but quicker and far more engaging.

Although targeted for grades 4 - 8, Vocabulary Through Morphemes would be appropriate for high school classes, particularly for remedial reading or intervention courses enrolling students with weak vocabularies. It would even be beneficial for individual high school students preparing for the SAT.

This program belongs in every gr. 4 - 8 classroom.

Fantastic Tool!!! This is a must use tool for all people teaching and studying Suffixes, Prefixes and Roots. I have used it for 6th, 7th and 8th graders. Mrs. Ebbers activities are practical and stimulating. This is a superb resource guide that will enable learners to add breath and richness to their lives. Every student's intellectual curiosity will expand as a richer vocabulary is developed!!! The lessons are inspiring, entertaining and enormously user friendly.

I have used Vocabulary Through Morphemes for three years now in a classroom with many ELL students. I find it is useful as a supplement to district adopted materials, and provides a great vocabulary development component which is not easily available elsewhere. A convenient CD is included to print up exactly what you need. The lessons are simple to follow for both teacher and students. I use this program three times a week for 20 minutes each time, and find it a valuable resource for my classroom.

This vocabulary program is created by a former teacher and expert in her field to provide other teachers with organized, sequential, enjoyable, teacher-friendly lessons that develop students' vocabulary skills. Everything the teacher needs is right there in one book and CD. I have used this program with struggling readers as well as GATE students. Both groups saw significant vocabulary growth. They came away with skills that will continue to aid them as they face challenging vocabulary in the future. All of this happens by devoting 20 minutes a day to teach lessons that are completely organized for you the teacher. I loved it!!

I like the content of this book and agree with the previous reviews on that point. But the setup, for the price, is much more cumbersome than I expected. Yes there is a CD and blackline masters, but they are for different things. The blackline masters are for the student worksheets, the CD is one long PDF of the instructional sheets (for display on an overhead/projector or copied for students) and the answer keys are shrunken versions of the student worksheets reprinted inside the book itself within the lesson plans (and since this is the kind of activity that I have the students self-correct, this doesn't make it easy for me to display). And due to the fact the student sheets are only on the blackline masters, I need to make a copy of the whole set and store them somewhere in case a page sent to be copied gets lost or eaten by the copy machine. I find this all very annoying. I thought all the student and instructional sheets would be on the CD at the very least as well as some ready-made assessments. For the price, I though there may even be a digital question bank to use for assessments. Alas no.

If the publisher would like to contact me, I would be happy to tell them how to fix their product to make it more busy-teacher friendly.

I have used this program in the past (borrowed from a colleague), but was happy to purchase my own copy. It is very useful in teaching students how our language truly works, and how to decode words to find their meaning. Research shows that people who know a wide vocabulary do well in testing and in finding better jobs. This program helps us as teachers give our students those resources.