The Importance of Morphology to Reading and Spelling
English is a morphophonemic language. It combines word parts that carry meaning (morphology) with sounds (phonics). Most literacy programs focus on phonics, teaching how letters and sounds work together. However, understanding morphology—how prefixes, suffixes, and root words build and change meaning—gives struggling readers another essential tool to decode text, improve comprehension, and master spelling.
The Word Cracking software makes teaching morphology easy, and our morphology training course, guided lesson plans, and lesson presets give you the tools to teach it well.
For students who struggle with standard literacy intervention.
The Literacy Support Kit bridges the gap for students with the most basic literacy skills.
Most structured literacy programs assume knowledge or ability that many children don’t have, particularly those living with severe dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD or intellectual disability. The Kit provides enhanced support with fine-grained guidance that teachers, tutors and parents can use to meet each student’s needs.
The Literacy Support Kit includes detailed instructions and over 500 pages of ready-to-use resources.
Online Word Cracker interactive morphology tool
The Word Cracker clearly illustrates complex multisyllabic words are formed from simple parts – base words or roots and affixes.
Using the Word Cracker, teachers and students can easily manipulate affixes, roots and bases to see how changing morphemes can change the meaning of the word and how it works around other words.
As well as developing grammatical understanding, this process supercharges vocabulary development as students rapidly build their lexicon from known words to more morphologically complex derivatives of these words.
Word cracker includes a suggested progression and sequence for teaching morphology in the classroom.
Our member’s section has detailed lesson suggestions that provide everything you need to teach morphology successfully.
Classroom Teachers with a basic grasp of morphology and suffixing spelling rules can use the Word Cracker to teach and review morphology and grammar concepts with entire class groups, with students working at tables or on the mat using Individual Student Word Cracker worksheets or whiteboards.
Using the word cracker for intensive tier 3 intervention
Wordcracker membership provides a summary of the Playberry™ spelling rules that relate to suffixing and offers guidance about how the Word Cracker can be used to teach and revise these rules.
Although this summary is directly related to the Playberry™ program, the similarity in scope and sequence between most high-level intervention programs means it is a valuable sequence of important spelling suffixing rules for anybody teaching morphology and spelling.
Literacy Support Kit - over 500 pages of worksheets and Resources
If you struggle to find the time to create effective teaching materials or are unsure how to structure lessons that meet your students’ diverse needs? We understand the challenges educators face, and we’ve done the hard work for you.
Key Features
- Phonemic Knowledge: Quickly introduces single phonemes to start reading one-syllable words.
- Simplifying Complex Concepts: Avoids unusual vowel variations initially; limits concept cards to suit student readiness.
- Handwriting Skills: Provides specific support for dysgraphia, focusing on pencil grip, letter formation, cursive, print and tricky letter combinations.
- Integration with Playberry Tier 3 and other Tier 3 programs.
- Time-Saving Solutions: As an educator, your time is valuable. We’ve crafted a ready-to-use material suite that requires no additional preparation—print and teach. These resources are structured to maximize classroom efficiency, allowing you to focus on delivering high-quality instruction rather than spending countless hours creating materials from scratch.
- Expertly Developed Content: Our resources are developed by seasoned literacy educators who understand the nuances of teaching students with varying needs. You don’t need to be an expert to use them—each resource is accompanied by clear, step-by-step instructions that guide you through the teaching process. From the initial assessment to foundational literacy skills, we provide everything you need to support your students effectively.
- Comprehensive Coverage: Whether your students are beginning readers or require more advanced interventions, our materials cover a wide spectrum of literacy skills. Our resources are divided into two levels:
- Blue Level: Designed for students who need very fine-grained support and simple, achievable activities.
- Green Level: Tailored for students who need extra basic skills practice before progressing to the next stage of their Tier 3 program.
This structured approach ensures that you can meet your students where they are and help them progress at the right pace.
What our users say
Why 96% of St Peters Woodlands year-one students perform at, or above, literacy benchmarks!
Watch the Video and read on to discover exactly how St Peter’s Woodlands Grammar School transformed their literacy education by embedding the science of reading across the whole school, using explicit direct instruction principles and Word Cracker morphology resources and tools.
Saint Ignatius College - The online Word Cracker has been useful, particularly when teaching to the whole class.
As a Year One teacher, it has been a tool which I have used as a part of my literacy routine to explicitly introduce morphology at a foundational level.
The beauty of the online wordcracker is that it is easy to use and quick to access using IWB. The wordcracker lines up with the wordcracker training and resource book allowing me to use it to explicitly teach both morphology and relative spelling rules to the whole class with ease.
The pre-set board setups have been fantastic as it allows me to quickly setup the board ready to teach a given spelling rule for example dropping the e when adding a vowel suffix. Not only has this been time saving for me as a teacher but also it allows for quick review of rules taught.
The students love the online wordcracker and even in a Year One classroom. We often find ourselves exploring roots and their morphology and how adding different suffixes and prefixes can make multiple different words.
I am currently building this into my explicit literacy block and the wordcracker means that I can access some morphology quickly using a familiar resource (the wordcracker). This means I can quickly expose students to new learning and reveiw this through the week which I have found has been the most effective way of addressing morphology at a foundation level.
Jared Centenera, Saint Ignatius College, South Australia
This year was an amazing one working with my Year 2s who love the Word Cracker sessions in our Daily Review.
We are an MSL school and we also incorporate other ways of teaching Reading and Writing. The students are using their learnt MSL skills and applying these when using prefixes, suffixes and base words. I have been including Word Cracker in our lessons predominately for exposure and the children always want to learn more about prefixes and suffixes they have not learnt yet.
For example, one of our Words of the Day was ‘grace’. The students then wanted to workshop how to separate the part of the word for graceful and gracefully and then came up with ungraceful, and ungracefully, and it even extended to using -ness. This then went off on a tangent to ‘messy, busy’ and they remembered when we incidentally learned about dropping the y to add /i/ to add -ness when we had these as irregular words.
They have become stronger readers and spellers as they have been using the Word Cracker PD. It is such a valuable resource, even at this younger level. I ended up taking the middle primary Word Cracker whiteboards and was using them with the Year 2s.
Elenor Pletsias, Oakleigh Primary School, South Australia