Tuesday Tip - How to Combine Phonics and Morphology

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss that to effectively teach children about word formation, you need to combine phonics with morphology.

Video Transcript

Hi everyone, it's Tuesday and it's time for a tip. Very often when we want to unpack words for children during a lesson, we mark the words up, which is a really great idea. That works nicely for the word take t-a-ke, but what about when it comes to taking? This kind of straight marking up doesn't necessarily work as well.

Instead of sticking with a phonics based explanation, combine it with morphology to really help children understand how the words work.

So what I would say is: our word that we want to write is 'taking', the base word is take t-a-ke, and I want to add the suffix -ing. But when I write my word, I need to drop the <e> because I'm adding a vowel suffix, giving me 'taking'.

Now, this is appropriate for younger children as well as older children. We want to help them understand how words actually work, not try and find shortcuts that really don't help them at all.

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