Anyone who’s worked in primary education in the last decade or so will be very familiar with phonemes – the smallest unit of sound that a word can divided into. Well, there’s another way to break up words as well: morphemes are the smallest individual units of meaning.

Every word in English, from the smallest to the longest, is constructed from a combination of roots, prefixes and suffixes. It is these that provide children with a logical way of working out the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

In this lesson, pupils will look under the bonnet of language to see how morphology works, before inventing some words of their own.

What they’ll learn

• The concept of morphology and how words are made of smaller parts
• How to use a knowledge of morphemes to make sense of new words
• How suffixes and prefixes can change the meaning of words
• How the English language has changed over time

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