Prefix and Suffix Flipbooks

Hey everyone! How crazy has the last week been for you? It's been really crazy for us! We had a short week (only 4 days) and SO MANY OBSERVATIONS. My mentor teacher had an observation on Tuesday and one on Thursday and then she observed me on Friday. We also had a Thanksgiving feast with our kids on Friday with vegetable soup in the crockpot, cornbread, fresh fruit and berries, and cookies. So yummy!

One lesson I did this week was about affixes- prefixes and suffixes. This is important for fourth grade to learn new words they come across in their reading. We used flipbooks to teach the affixes. Have you ever seen these?

One side of the flipbook

Reverse side of the same flipbook

These are actually two flipbooks stapled back to back. This is how you make them:
1) Get some colorful paper- we had three pieces of paper per student (all different colors).
2) Cut each piece of paper in half lengthwise.

So much paper involved

3) Fold the pieces of paper different lengths, like the picture below. We kept one as a model while folding and folded the rest to match it.

Pictures are really needed to explain this part!

4) Stack the pieces of paper, one inside another, like a Russian doll, and then staple across the top.

Booyah

5) Staple two books back to back so you can do prefixes on one side and suffixes on the other.

Once the books were made, each student wrote a prefix (or suffix) on each flap with the definition under the flap above. We did all of these together. Then they went to different spots around the room to read their independent books. As they read, they had to find one example of each in the book and write that, along with two examples they could think of, under the affix. They had a total of three examples per affix and then we went over everyone's and talked about what examples we found.

Sometimes we fit two on one flap.

The examples for mis- and non- are on the yellow.
The examples for un- are on the other side of the orange.

I love these flip books! They're great resources for the kids to keep and a lot of fun to make. I just used the list of affixes from the standard for Florida, but you can do whichever ones you need. I would recommend making them for the kids ahead of time and then having them fill them out. Also, I wrote sideways, but it would probably be easier to write normally. Live and learn, right?

This week we only have two days of school! Two days of school and five days off? Can we do this every week???