DragonABC

Name: ______________________________Class: ______________________________

Dragon ABCAt Hordle C.E. Primary School, we want all our pupils to become confident and fluent writers. In order to make this possible, children need to become competent spellers so they can use all of their time and energy when writing to come up with good ideas, create impressive sentences and select interesting vocabulary. You will notice that the way in which we are teaching spelling has slightly changed this term. Instead of focusing on one suffix, prefix or spelling pattern a week, we will be looking at word families. This involves your child learning to spell three root words and how to apply suffixes/prefixes to these to make new words. We have also included some homophones for them to learn each week.In school, we will use a range of strategies to help the children learn their spellings. Each week, they will be tested on any of the words from a word family however it is important that they are not just learning words for their weekly test – we expect to see them correctly in their writing from that point forwards!At home, they should be exploring what words can be created by adding suffixes/prefixes to the root words and building a firm understanding of rules (eg happy – happily, change the y to an i). To help the children understand the meaning of the words they are focusing on, it is a really good idea for them to practise writing them in sentences (particularly the homophones).Thank you for your continued support.

A prefix is a letter or a group of letters that appears at the beginning of a word and changes the word’s original meaning. A suffix is a letter or a group of letters that is added onto the end of words, to change the way a word fits into a sentence grammatically.

Prefix Suffix

dis – changes meaning to the opposite eg disapprove

ed – forms past tense of regular verbs eg played

mis – wrong or badly eg misunderstood

ing – forms present tense of verbs eg playing

in/un/ir/il/im – not eg impossible, uncertain

er – used to form comparatives eg greater

re – to do again eg reappear est – used to form superlatives eg greatest

sub – under or beneath eg submerge

ly – to form adjectives or adverbs eg brotherly, quickly

super – above or over eg superhuman

tion/sion/ssion – act of, state of or result of eg permission, action

anti – against eg anticlockwise

cian – having a certain skill or art eg musician

auto – self eg autopilot ous/ful – full of eg colourful, mysterious

inter – between or among eg international

less – without eg careless

ness – state or quality eg happinessment – action or result eg measurement

Example

Root wordsappear

appearingappeared

appearancedisappear

disappearancedisappeareddisappearing

respect

respectfulrespecting

disrespectfulrespectfullyrespecteddisrespect

disrespectfully

behave

behavingmisbehave

misbehavingbehaved

Homophoneshear here

Sentences

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Week One – 24/4/17

Root wordsactual arrive address

Homophones write right

Sentences

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Week Two – 1/5/17

Root wordsbreathe learn different

Homophonesaffect effect

Sentences

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Week Three – 8/5/17

Root wordsdifficult natural ordinary

Homophonesgrate great

Sentences

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Week Four – 15/5/17

Root wordsparticular extreme occasion

Homophonesplain plane

Sentences

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Week Five – 22/5/17

Root wordspromise regular possible

Homophonesberry bury

Sentences

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Week One – 5/6/17

Root wordspeculiar group purpose

Homophonesmedal meddle

Sentences

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Week Two – 12/6/17

Root wordslength thought experiment

Homophonesgroan grown

Sentences

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Week Three – 19/6/17

Root wordsDescribe Appear Exercise

Homophonesball bawl

Sentences

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Week Four – 26/6/17

Root wordsrecent knowledge guard

Homophonesmail male

Sentences

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Week Five – 3/7/17

Root wordsquarter special centre

Homophonesfair fare

Sentences

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Week Six – 10/7/17

Root wordssentence circle decide

Homophonesweight wait

Sentences

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Week Seven – 17/7/17

Root wordspopular continue believe

Homophonesexcept accept

Sentences

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