Suffix worksheets

The words that change are the reason this sheet exists. Adding an ending to a word is straightforward until the word ends in y, in e, or in a single consonant after a short vowel — and those three cases cover most of the spelling mistakes made by children who can already spell every word on their list. Meeting “happiness”, “making” and “hopping” on the same page is what makes the three rules visible as a set rather than as three surprises.

Every answer here was written out by a person rather than worked out by a rule, and that is deliberate. English has too many exceptions for a generator to be trusted with them: a program that added “-ing” by rule would print “hopeing” or “makeing” somewhere on the page, and an answer key that is wrong is worse than no sheet at all. The words on this page are checked, which is what makes the key behind it worth marking against.

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.