If you have a High School aged student, you may be wondering how to prepare them for standardized testing. One way often emphasized is to teach word roots. While word roots are valuable, learning prefixes and suffixes are vitally important too. Emily and I have been reviewing Greek Morphemes Lessons (It’s NOT Greek to Me!) from Ready to Teach for the Schoolhouse Review Crew for the past seven weeks. Besides being an easy-to-use, open-and-go curriculum, I’ve learned that you don’t have to wait until High School for your students to benefit from this program.
The basic Greek Morphemes set includes an Instructor’s Manual, with flash drive, and a consumable Student book. (The Instructor’s book used to come with a CD, but Ready to Teach has realized many people are purchasing laptops without internal CD players, so thus, the change to a flash drive.)
This program is thorough, yet still so simple to use. The Instructor’s guide gives you a blueprint of the different suggested ways to implement this program. The three basic plans are: first - in a classroom setting, where the instructor uses the an overhead projector, or the enclosed powerpoint slides to teach the morphemes (word parts) to a group all at once, then the student do their assignments independently. The second plan involves the parent and student working together through the powerpoint slides on the computer, then the student working on the assignments, with Mom or Dad helping as needed and grading the tests. The third plan works well for older students (like our Emily - almost 17.) In this third option, the student uses the flash drive to watch the power point lessons, then works independently on their assignments each week. This option really only requires the parent/ teacher to be available for the weekly tests and to help sparingly as needed.
Watching how easily Emily learned how to do what was asked of her in each assignment, I realized that these lessons could easily be used with younger students. If you have a Middle School aged student who has learned to work at least semi-independently, you could use the second option and give them a head start on understanding these word pieces that are so prevalent in the reading they will likely be doing in High School.
For classroom settings (or your local co-op) the Instructor’s Manual has more than you should ever need, and is divided into sections for easy navigation. The first section is short, but sweet, and includes the how-to’s on getting started, plus bulletin board ideas. The second part includes the lessons and answers your students should be working to find. The third section includes transparency masters, which are helpful for school settings where technology is not readily available. The fourth section includes review activities to help your student prepare for the tests, and the fifth section is the tests and answer keys. This softcover book also includes pre-made review cards for the teacher so you can keep up with what your students are learning.
The student book includes pages for recording what is learned in each lesson, as well as exercises that challenge them to put those new morphemes right to work. In the back is a section of cardstock designed to be transformed into review cards by the student. Emily found it easiest to cut these cards apart using our scrapbooking paper cutter so the edges all stayed straight.
From Emily:
Greek Morphimes is a well written, easy-to-follow course on understanding greek roots, prefixes and endings in the words we use every day. The book comes with easy to tear out cards for memorization and a flash drive of lessons. Each lesson begins with a slideshow of the word definitions and an explanation of the lesson sections for the week. The definitions are written down in the workbook along with the other assignments, which include defining vocabulary words, using them in explanatory sentences and having the student make up new words of their own. Each of the lessons (save the first) add the pieces from previous lessons in their vocabulary words. The lessons are each followed by a test of that week’s definitions, all on the same flash drive. A glossary can be found at the end of the workbook with all of the definitions from the twelve lessons. It has made finding parts of words for definitions much easier for me, and all I needed besides the book and cards was scissors or a paper cutter for the cards and a dictionary.
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