How to Teach Suffixes

Welcome to our mini teaching guide on suffixes! In this post, you’ll find many different tools to help you teach suffixes to your child, as well as downloadable resources and activities. Let’s dig in!

What Is a Suffix?

A suffix is a word part that is placed at the end of a base word. Common suffixes include ED, ING, and EST. Take a look at more suffix examples below.

A suffix often transforms a word into a new part of speech. In the examples above, baby (a noun) is changed to babyish (an adjective); run (a verb) is changed to runner (a noun).

The Four Most Common Suffixes

The most common suffixes are S, ES, ED, and ING. These four suffixes are the most useful for beginning readers and spellers to learn because they appear frequently in words, and their meanings are easy to understand and remember.

Suffix S and ES indicate plurals.

Suffix ED indicates past tense.

Most often, suffix ING is added to verbs to indicate that something is happening in the present.

Interested in seeing more suffixes? Here’s a list of 30 common suffixes you can download and print.

Adding Suffixes Is Different from Adding Prefixes

When adding a prefix to a word (Check out our mini guide on teaching prefixes!), you simply add the prefix to the beginning of the base word (as in unhappy). The spelling of the base word never changes. Super easy, right?

But adding a suffix to a word isn’t quite as straightforward. That’s because when you add a suffix, the base word often changes. For example:

Thankfully, there are some solid guidelines to follow when adding suffixes to words. Before we dive into those rules, though, let’s take a quick look at the two types of suffixes.

Two Types of Suffixes

You may have noticed on the free download that the suffixes are divided into two categories.

It’s important for kids to recognize whether a suffix is a consonant suffix or a vowel suffix since the rules for adding them to base words are different.

Rules for Adding Suffixes

Rule 1: Add a consonant suffix directly to the base word.

Rule 2: Check the base word before adding a vowel suffix.

Here are the first three guidelines we teach for adding vowel suffixes.

• If the base word ends in two consonants, just add the vowel suffix.

• If the base word has 1 syllable, 1 short vowel, and 1 final consonant, double the final consonant before adding the vowel suffix. (We teach this as the “1-1-1 Rule.” Although it may sound complicated, this rule is actually quite easy to follow when you have an understanding of syllable division rules.)

• If the base word ends in a Silent E , drop the E before adding the vowel suffix. (Again, this is an easy rule to understand: you don’t want to have two E’s in a row, so you have to drop the first E.)

Rule 3: If the base word ends in a single Y, change the Y to an I before adding the suffix.

(This rule applies to both consonant suffixes and vowel suffixes.)

There are more rules regarding vowel suffixes, but they apply to a smaller number of words. We teach them thoroughly and incrementally in All About Reading and All About Spelling, with plenty of hands-on practice.

What does hands-on practice look like? We use letter tiles for demonstration, and then we move on to interesting activity sheets! 

Printable Activities for Learning about Suffixes

Would you like to see some examples? Here are a few great suffix activities from All About Reading and All About Spelling.

Go Nutty Activity

Sort suffixes into vowel suffixes and consonant suffixes with this hungry elephant.
Download this activity from All About Reading Level 3 (Lesson 15).

Sleeping Mice Activity

Practice locating the base word by covering the sleeping mice with a blanket.
Download this activity from All About Reading Level 3 (Lesson 15).

Suffix Word Flippers

Practice reading words with two suffixes with these Word Flippers .
Download this activity from All About Reading Level 4 (Lesson 4).

Word Trees

Use Word Trees to create longer words by adding prefixes and suffixes.
Learn more in this blog post, and download this activity from All About Spelling Level 7 (Lesson 17) to let your child practice building words with Word Trees.

Have you started teaching suffixes to your child yet? How is it going? Let me know in the comments below!