Prefix worksheets

A prefix is the cheapest vocabulary a child will ever learn. Knowing that “un-” means not, “re-” means again and “dis-” means the opposite turns every root word they already have into two or three more, and it works in reverse too: a reader who meets “unfamiliar” for the first time can take the front off it and be nearly right. Four prefixes cover most of what turns up in primary reading.

Nothing changes at the join, which is the whole reason prefixes come before suffixes. “un” plus “happy” is “unhappy” with both parts intact — no letter dropped, no letter doubled — so a child can trust the addition. That stops being true the moment an ending is added instead, which is what the suffix sheet is for. “mis + spell” is the one to look at twice: both s's stay, which is why “misspell” is the word people most often mis-spell.

The answers were decided when the sheet was built, so the key is the same page with them drawn in rather than a second attempt at the same questions — there is no way for the two to disagree. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from: it is printed so that the identical sheet can be had again next week, rather than one that merely looks like it.

This page is one sheet out of a family that can print thousands. The topic is a setting rather than a different worksheet: ten of them — rhyme, syllables, word families, prefixes and suffixes, plurals, contractions, homophones, synonyms and antonyms — and each is asked in whichever of the three shapes suits it, written on a ruled line, circled from four, or joined up in two columns. How many questions and how many columns are switches beside them.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

Word Jungle deals the sight-word lists as flash cards: the word is read aloud, in a sentence, and typed back — which is the half of spelling a worksheet cannot do, because paper cannot say a word out loud. A child who has just worked through a page is the one likeliest to race it, and the record book then knows which words they keep missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.