Hi everyone, here is an example of an English worksheet for grade 6 on Prefixes, Stems and Suffixes... many of the sources on this subject provide either too much or too little information for a grade 6 learner, so i have drawn from a few sources to come up with something that i think will serve the purpose. This is one of the things that must be covered according to the South African Department of Education, as part of the Milestones of English learning. If you would like to download this, there is link below.
Prefixes, Stems and Suffixes or Extensions:
When you are trying to work out the meaning of a new word, it is always best to know what Part of Speech it is. This will tell you what the word is supposed to “do” in a sentence, for example, a “verb” tells you that the word describes an action. Prefixes and Suffixes also give valuable clues as to what part of speech the word is and whether that word is positive or negative... Let us explore together:
STEMS
A stem is a word that can stand alone. It has no attachments at the beginning or end of it and it cannot be broken down any further other than to look at its syllables. For example “bother” is a stem word, one can also call stem words “root” words as they are the words that other words can grow from. You cannot have “both” or “er” so “bother” is the root, it can then grow into “bothered” or “bothering”
PREFIXES
This is something that you put at the beginning of a root word in order to change its meaning. For example, our root word could be “happy” and we could use the prefix “un” to change the meaning of the word to “unhappy”.
SUFFIXES
Suffixes work in the exact same way as prefixes, except that this time you are adding something on to the end of your stem/ root in order to change its meaning. For example, if the root word is “joy”, one could add “ful” to the end to make the word “joyful”.
Along with suffixes, comes another form called EXTENSIONS: these are simply suffixes that are added on to words that already have a root and a suffix, for example, “joy+ful” is a root and a suffix but you can still add another suffix to change the word further still. You could add “ness” to make the word “joyfulness”, or “ly” to make “joyfully”.
As was mentioned earlier, you can now see that your prefix and suffix may give you a clue as to the word's part of speech..joyful is an adjective, joyfulness is an abstract noun and joyfully is an adverb...so be careful and watch closely to see how these words can help you in test situations.
LET'S PRACTICE!
FROM THE LIST OF PREFIXES, (DIS-, IL-, IM-, IN-, NON-, AND UN-) CHOSE THE CORRECT ONE FOR EACH WORD:
__similar
__appear
__balance
__perfect
__active
__ability
__sense
__natural
__mature
__personal
__correct
__popular
__honest
__polite
__complete
FROM THE FOLLOWING LIST OF ROOTS, CHANGE THE MEANING OF THE WORD USING A SUFFIX OF YOUR CHOICE:
appear
perfect
active
natural
honest
Chose two of these and add an extension.
Download this worksheet: Prefix, Suffix, and Stem Worksheet.doc (157 KB)
