Strengthen Vocabulary Skills through Suffix Activities 

When your students make a commitment to their suffix studies, you’ll develop capable, interested language learners! 

This interactive Google Slides activity gives students plenty of opportunities to define and integrate suffixes into sentences. 

Students will either drag and drop or type the answer to match suffixes with their meanings, words with suffixes, and transform incorrect phrases. 

Slides in this activity focus on the following suffixes: 

• -er
• -or
• -est
• -logy
• -ful
• -ed 
• -less
• -able
• -es
• -ies

Scaffolding + Extension Tips 

A team of dedicated, experienced educators created this resource to support your foundational language lessons. 

In addition to individual student work time, use these suffix activities to enhance learning through guided reading groups, whole class lessons, or remote learning assignments. 

If you have a mixture of above- and below-level learners, and ELL/ESL students, we have a few suggestions for keeping readers on track with these concepts: 

🆘 Support Struggling Students

Many learners find visual references helpful when trying to grasp and review concepts. Provide students with learning tools like a suffix poster or classroom anchor chart to refresh their memories. Additionally, students can work with a partner to complete the task.

➕ Challenge Fast Finishers

Using slide two as a reference, have students create lists of 2-3 different words per suffix. Additionally, students should define each word with its suffix and write it in a sentence. 

✋ Class Review

Turn this activity into a post-lesson assessment or use it right before a test to give students extra practice. Project the Google Slides to your small group or whole class, and call on students to complete the suffix activities by writing the words in their notebooks. (Google Slides users must be in Edit mode to move the pieces, not Presentation mode.)   

Get our 10 Best Scaffolding Strategies here! 

Easily Prepare This Resource for Your Students

Please note that this activity is an interactive Google Slides resource. 

After downloading, make a copy of the resource: 

1. Click on File.
2. From the dropdown menu, hover your cursor over Make a copy.
3. From the side bar, click on Entire presentation. 
4. On-page elements are moveable in Edit mode only.

Alternatively, turn this activity into worksheets by printing each slide for students to record their answers. 

Affix these prefix and suffix activity ideas to your English lessons! 

teaching resource

Prefixes and Suffixes Slide Deck

Help your students determine the meanings of prefixes and suffixes with an instructional slide deck.

teaching resource

Playing with Prefixes Board Game

Practice building and using words with common prefixes with a fun prefix board game.

teaching resource

Building Words with Suffixes Sorting Activity

Build words by matching the root word to suffixes, recording the new words on the answer sheet.