Description

This simple, free, download-and-print word-building game requires players to add two productive suffixes (-ed and -ing) or one suffix/ending that’s no longer productive in English (-le) to words with ‘short’ vowels, and write the new word, doubling the final consonant first if required.

When a new verb is made up in English, like the word ‘blog’, we can add -ed and -ing to it, to get ‘blogged’ and ‘blogging’. It’s productive, we can use it to produce new words.

Sadly, we can’t add ‘le’ to verbs to create words like ‘bloggle’ any more (despite what the makers of Boggle might say), so we’re stuck with words that already existed when the suffix went of production a few centuries ago.

However, there’s still often a clear relationship between base word and suffix in words that end in ‘le’, e.g. ‘hand-handle’ and ‘spark-sparkle’. There are heaps of words ending in -le, many of which have ‘short’ vowels followed by a double consonant, so we want our learners to practise spelling them.

Here’s how to play Suf-Fix-It initial code with these three endings: