Holiday Morphology Word Building – Free Printables
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Grab these FREE printable holiday-themed morphology word part cards! Kids will have fun with this targeted activity as they try to combine 27 common prefixes, bases, and suffixes to form lots of real words.
Why We Love It
Managing the classroom countdown to winter break can feel like a full-time job! Keeping routines consistent and adding purposeful activities are key to maintaining your sanity during this busy time of year.
I’ve always found that holiday-themed resources are a great tool to harness students’ excitement while reinforcing important literacy skills.
With this holiday morphology activity, kids will practice building words using morphemes, or word parts.
It’s an engaging and fun, while helping students build a solid foundation of word structure and vocabulary— all while keeping the holiday spirit alive (and managed) in your classroom!
Morphology Word Cards
Included are 27 common morphemes for continued and repeated practice. But these aren’t any old cards; instead, we designed each morpheme card as a gift box.
You’ll get:
Using the Activity
This activity is super versatile!
It can be used independently at centers, in small groups for morphology instruction, or upgrade and grab the full game for extended fun!
We recommend printing in color and then cutting and laminating for extended use. Each child will need a blank recording sheet.
📝 Independent Center Work:
- Kids sort word cards into prefixes, bases, and suffixes.
- Students manipulate the word cards to create real words with two or three morphemes.
- Students record the words on the recording sheet.
👩🏻🏫 Small Group Instruction:
- Choose a few of the prefixes, bases, and suffixes for a mini-lesson.
- Explicitly teach the concepts of morphemes, the smallest unit of meaning. Explain and model how adding morphemes together creates new words with new meanings. Demonstrate using word sums.
- After demonstrating and having the students try (I do, we do) hand out the word cards to students and let them build words and record them on the recording sheet (you do.)
Important Note: After kids build words, challenge them to investigate each word part’s meaning. Building words is only part of the aim of this activity. The most important thing is that kids understand how each morpheme adds to the overall meaning of the word.
➡️ Need more for targeted instruction? Grab our morphology word cards with literal meanings!
More Morphology Resources
We love gamifying practice! Upgrade and get our Holiday Morphology Game.
It comes with 57 word cards (plus blank cards to write any target morpheme), word sum and word analysis templates, a suffix spelling graphic, and a cheat sheet with all morphemes and their meanings!
More Morphology Resources:
- Word Matrix (Free printable)
- Roll & Read Morphology Game
- SOR Poster (Free printable)
- Latin Base Resource
- Greek Base Resource
- Suffix -ED Printables
- Suffix -S and -ES Printables
Download & Print
DOWNLOAD TERMS: All of our resources and printables are designed for personal use only in homes and classrooms. Each teacher must download his or her own copy. You may not: Save our files to a shared drive, reproduce our resources on the web, or make photocopies for anyone besides your own students. To share with others, please use the social share links provided or distribute the link to the blog post so others can download their own copies. Your support in this allows us to keep making free resources for everyone! Please see our Creative Credits page for information about the licensed clipart we use. If you have any questions or concerns regarding our terms, please email us. Thank you!
🎄Get MORE Holiday Freebies: Elf on the Shelf Word Sorts, Santa Express R-Controlled Roll & Write Games.
Tell us how you’re using this holiday morphology resource! Leave us a comment below.