I just learned I’ve been pronouncing affix wrong. The word begins with the long a sound. My pronunciation sounded a little like a stifled sneeze: ahhhh-fix! 🙂 I love learning, even when it involves red cheeks and a nervous giggle. One day, I’ll share with you my “voilà” tale. It’s a doozy!
So, back to affixes. According to Common Core State Standards, the learning of affixes (prefixes and suffixes) begins in kindergarten. By third grade, students are decoding words with common Latin suffixes. Yikes! Here’s my million dollar question for y’all: what affixes are your students expected to know by the end of the school year?
Now, I can’t promise you a million dollars for sharing your affix insights on this blog; however…I can offer you the chance to win a Valentine’s Day goody bag! Simply include in your comment the grade(s) you teach and the affixes your students are learning this year. Do this before midnight ET, Thursday, February 7, and your name will be entered in a drawing for the giveaway!
Happily,
Diane
Congratulations to Allison! She’s the winner of our giveaway!
I teach 6th grade. Our state standards do not specify a particular set of affixes. Instead it says students should be able to explain the affect affixes have on words and be able to determine the meaning of a word based on the use of an affix. We are studying a bunch of them to try to prepare my students.
I teach prek and we do not teach affixes.
L.4.4 “Use common, grade-appropriate Greek and Latin affixes and roots as clues to the meaning of the word (e.g., telegraph, photograph,autograph)
That is all the guidance we are given! (NY CCSS)
I teach self-contained grades 3-5, and here is what came directly from Common Core Standards. I quoted it directly, and listed the source.
Grade 3:
a. “Identify and know the meaning of the most
common prefixes and derivational suffixes.”
b. “Decode words with common Latin suffixes.”
Grade 4:
a. “Use combined knowledge of all letter-sound
correspondences, syllabication patterns, and
morphology (e.g., roots and affixes) to read
accurately unfamiliar multisyllabic words in
context and out of context.”
Grade 5:
a. “Use combined knowledge of all letter-sound
correspondences, syllabication patterns, and
morphology (e.g., roots and affixes) to read
accurately unfamiliar multisyllabic words in
context and out of context.”
(Common Core State Standards Initiative, pages 16-17, 2012.)
I haven’t seen any affixes on our kindergarten standards.
un and pre are two that we are studying in first grade
none in Kinder.
We don’t really do any yet in first grade.
We don’t do that type of word study yet. We are still doing word families.
in 5th grade we study quite a few connected to spelling words and vocabulary study.
I’m my preschool class we don’t cover affixes!
I work with mainly 2.5-5 year olds, so we don’t teach the concept of affixes specifically. Instead, we talk generally about how they affect the meaning of words. We point out things like “when we add “ed” to words like play or cry, it’s a clue that the events happened in the past. “Un”, at the beginning of a word is a clue that the meaning is opposite (“unhappy” = not happy = upset, or “unzip” is an open zipper, rather than a closed one). My hope is that these discussions will help the kids unlock the stucture of our language and the meaning of words in the future.
The current grade 3 standard for my district states that students need to “apply knowledge of prefixes and suffixes to determine meanings of words”. I teach a unit on prefixes and suffixes, but throughout the year try to use words out of the stories we are reading to build onto their list of affixes.
Mine are learning un, re, pre, tion, sion, ly. We are really learning them as they appear in our chapter books we read plus we do games and lessons on smartboard.
2nd grade – pre, dis, un, re, mis, able, ly, ment, ful
Aren’t rhyming words a subdivision of affixes? If so, we definitely teach that in pre-k. 🙂
The ones we need to teach in second grade are prefixes: Pre, re, un, sub and suffixes are ed and ing.
I teach Kindergarten so we don’t really “teach” affixes, but I do discuss them with the children when reading books, playing games, etc.
Kelly Brown
Cherryville Elementary
700 E Academy St.
Cherryville, NC 28021
I mainly teach math, but I do know that we cover many prefixes and suffixes.
Oops! Forgot to say my grad level is 3rd.