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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Developing and sustaining foundational language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking--beginning reading and writing. The student develops word structure knowledge through phonological awareness, print concepts, phonics, and morphology to communicate, decode, and spell.

Provide students with cards that have base words on the front and a prefix or a suffix on the back. Have students read the base word first and then flip the card over and write the new word with the prefix or suffix applied to the base word.

Cards might include the following words:

  • Front: circle, back: semi-
  • Front: oriented, back: dis-
  • Front: behave, back: mis-
  • Front: state, back: inter-
  • Front: color, back: multi-
     

Further Explanation

This assessment requires students to have phonetic knowledge of and experience with dividing words with prefixes into word parts (prefix + base word) in order to correctly spell words with prefixes. Knowledge is acquired through practice and experience with decoding and spelling words with prefixes.

Both decoding and encoding skills are needed to build a foundation in reading. Decoding is sounding words out according to letter-sound relationship conventions. Encoding is the process of using letter-sound knowledge to write or spell words. Students must understand the various spelling patterns and rules of the English language to correctly construct words in their written products. It is important that students apply these rules consistently instead of using invented spelling because they may unknowingly write a word that is real but that they did not intend, causing confusion for their reader.
Students must be able to accurately spell words with common prefixes. Students should understand that a prefix is added before a root or base word to generally show relations in space and time, such as re-, trans-, inter-, sub-, ob-, ad-. Prefixes can also negate and reverse, such as dis-, un-, non-, anti-. Sometimes they intensify the meaning of the root, such as con- and re-.

Research

Composition Writing Studio. Argumentative essay/commentary. University of Purdue’s Online Writing Lab. Retrieved from: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/685/05/

Summary: This online resource offers a complete overview of the writing processes and the components involved in each. The overview includes definition of terms, examples, graphs and charts as appropriate, and additional resources.