Tuesday Tip - Avoid Suffixing Shortcuts

In today's Tuesday Tip, I discuss suffixes and avoiding using shortcuts when teaching students.

Video Transcript

It's Jocelyn here with a Tuesday tip. It's easy to fall into the trap of sharing shortcuts with children about how words are spelled. So perhaps the word raked comes up. Well, you might say, well, we have to add the suffix -ed, but there's already an E there, so just whack a D on the end. Well, that actually doesn't help children understand how that particular convention works.

It's a little bit like telling kids to just add a zero when you want to times by 10. That works later, but first you have to know what is actually happening. So a better thing to do is to say, well, we want to write the word raked, the base word is rake. I have to add my suffix -ed, but because I'm adding a vowel suffix to a word ending in e, I drop that e and so our new word is raked, and it's spelled this.

Shortcuts are fine once you know what you're doing, and the children will come to that in their own time. But in these initial introductions, when children are just developing this knowledge, make sure that you provide full, accurate explanations of how the words work

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