Enquiring into Base Words Procedure

We began by discussing what base words are. Then we shared our understandings of what affixes are: prefixes and suffixes and how and why we use them.

We then selected one of the base words we were interested in enquiring into and this formed groups. 


Here is a Google slideshow that took us through the steps of how to conduct our word enquiries:

Word Enquiry Steps


Our enquiries:

Sharing our enquiries with our classmates:

But why is it spelt with a silent K?  I told this group of our teacher at our school who was a passionate and knowledgeable word enquirer so they could ask her when they next see her in the corridor or on the playground.

They did and learnt that in old English, people used to pronounce the words with the K.   Eg, knife was pronounced as K-NIFE,  knight was pronounced as K-NIGHT etc   But as time went on, the pronunciation of those words changed,but not the spelling.

(They didn't find any connections with other languages so decided that the word mustn't be Latin-based or else we would probably find it in French, Spanish, Italian etc)

This group enquired into the base word GRAPH:

Their first attempt at creating a word matrix:

This group enquired into the base word STRUCT:

(Brainstorming words we know with the base word STRUCT in it.  It's important they write these on post it notes so that they can later put them into groups)

Their enquiry:

Their first attempt at a matrix:

Sharing their enquiries with their classmates:

Over the next few weeks, we used these matrixes as part of our home learning to build words using the base words.  Student-created home learning! :)