Lesson on Suffixes: "ness" and "less"

One of the activities that went with our story this week called Across the Wide Dark Sea had to do with teaching two suffixes:  "ness" and "less".  Not only was it a good opportunity to discuss what the suffixes meant, but it also allowed us to talk about the parts of speech of these words that were directly related to each suffix.

First, we discussed what the suffix "less" meant by looking at a couple sentences from the story. 

“And some began to ask why we had left our safe homes to go on this endless journey to an         unknown land.”

“After so many days at sea, we began to feel hopeless.”

“Yet the storms and sickness went on.”

“One big problem on the ship was dampness.”

The Native Americans showed kindness toward the settlers.

We looked at the base word, and students were asked what the base word of each word was.  They were also asked what part of speech the base word was, and we noticed that they were all adjectives.  We discovered that adding "ness" to the adjective changed the word into a noun.  The word became "a state of being sick, a state of being damp...".

Since we are learning how to take notes, I asked students what they noticed about punctuation that was used or not used with the sentences.  They noticed that the sentences that came right out of the book had qoutation marks around them so that they knew the sentences were not written in my own words.  They also said they knew I had written the last sentence in my own words since the parentheses were not there (they know that I don't like it when stories use the word "Indian" instead of "Native American").

3 tables of students were then asked to come up with 3 lists of words that had the suffix "less" at the end, and the other 3 tables were asked to identify 3 lists of words that had the suffix "ness" at the end.  I roamed around the room to remind students to make sure they were using a dictionary to see if the words they were writing were real words.  I typed up the word lists in alphabetical order so they could be hung at the front of the room and only included the words that were actually words.  Today I used those lists to play "Sparkle" with the students.

Playing "Sparkle" was not only fun but informative.  I could listen for patterns that students didn't know yet so that I can plan mini-lessons on those spelling patterns.  For example, for the words "craziness" and "happiness", all students spelled it with a "y" instead of an "i".  Now I know I need to do a mini-lesson on how we change the "y" to an "i" in words like this.  Then we can brainstorm more words that fit that spelling rule:  laziness, dizziness...

Play one of the Suffix Games to see how much you have learned about these suffixes.
When you feel good about being able to identify these base words and their suffixes, take a Suffix Quiz to see how well you identify words that have the suffixes we learned about in our lesson.

After reading each sentence, a student was asked to go to the Smart Board to underline the word with that suffix.  Then we discussed what that word meant (endless=without end and hopeless=without hope).  A few student volunteers were called on to give a couple different examples.  We also discussed what part of speech these words were, and we discovered that all of them were adjectives because they describe something. 

Then we went on to the next suffix of "ness" and did the same thing.  These were the sentences from the story we looked at: