Teaching Children about Plurals, Inflectional Endings, Prefixes, Suffixes, Compound Words and More begins with an introduction to singular and plural words. Easy-to-understand instructions on how to form different plurals are provided, along with examples and colorful illustrations. Students will be taught how to determine if -s or -es should be added to the ending to form the plural, if the spelling stays the same in the singular and plural (e.g., deer), or if the plural is formed by making another kind of change to the singular noun (e.g., child, children). They will also learn that a final f or fe of a noun is often changed to v before adding -es to make it mean more than one (e.g., life becomes lives) and that a final y of a word is often changed to i before adding -es to form the plural (e.g., baby, babies). Besides the lesson pages, there are also corresponding worksheets that can be used for individual practice, to assess student learning, or for the teacher to use for direct instruction purposes on the classroom screen. Reproducible worksheets that teach about inflectional endings, irregular verbs, compound words, and prefixes and suffixes are also available. (The practice test discussed below may also be reproduced for non-commercial, classroom use.) Students will discover that the inflectional endings -s or -es, -ing, and -ed can be added to verbs to change their tense (past, present, future) and that -er and -est can be used for comparison purposes of adjectives and adverbs (closer, closest). Moreover, they will learn that the final consonant of some words must be doubled and the final e of some words dropped before adding an ending that begins with a vowel (shop + ing = shopping, close + ing = closing) and that the final y of some words is changed to i before adding an ending that doesn't begin with an i (cry + ed = cried).
Students will be taught to recognize the different forms of verbs (simple form, -s form, present participle, past tense, past participle) and the forms of comparison for adjectives and adverbs (positive, comparative, superlative). They will also be taught how to recognize various irregular verbs and irregular comparatives and superlatives. In addition, students will discover how a root word changes in meaning when another word, a prefix, or a suffix is added to it and will learn that there are three different kinds of compound words (closed, open, and hyphenated).
A practice test is included towards the end of the book. The same practice test is also available online as a computer-based test. You can access the test free of charge by visiting the website of Habakkuk Educational Materials. The computer will notify students if an answer is correct or incorrect, and their grades will be displayed after completing a test. When the student feels confident or at the teacher's discretion, there is also a computer-based unit test they can take to test their comprehension over the book's content. This book could be introduced to students as early as the first grade and used throughout elementary and middle school. Actual testing of the content could begin as early as the 2nd or 3rd grade.
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