This is Kaikorai Primary School's third article in a series relating to Structured Literacy. In this article we will be looking at Morphology.

Morphology is an important element that is taught to children at Kaikorai Primary and incorporated into our Structured Literacy lessons.

The content of Structured Literacy is integrated into our class reading programmes.  

What is Morphology?

Morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words. 

Why is Morphology Important?

Researchers have reported a strong relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge.  Morphological awareness improves spelling, reading, vocabulary and comprehension.  

How do you teach Morphology?

When we teach morphology, we look at the structure of words and parts of words such as root/base words, prefixes, and suffixes.

Here are a few examples of activities that we might do with our students to teach morphology:

* Find the base word e.g puffed - puff, looked - look, grinned - grin

* Bringing attention to how words can change - looking at the part of the word that is the same and the part that is different. 

e.g bike, biking, biked

*Looking at how words change to mean more than one object (or the plural form of a word). 

e.g bag - bags, kid - kids, rock - rocks.

*Come up with a list of verbs (doing words) together.  Write the words down in their base form and then with the -ing morpheme added. 

e.g jump-jumping, flap-flapping, run-running, hop-hopping