Printable Word Chop Worksheets

Word Chops are a great way to learn and master new vocabulary words. The words are chopped into two pieces. The challenge is for students to figure out which two parts go together.

Grade Leveled Word Chop Worksheets

1. Grade 1 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
2. Grade 2 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
3. Grade 3 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
4. Grade 4 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
5. Grade 5 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
6. Grade 6 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
7. Grade 7 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5
8. Grade 8 - List 1, List 2, List 3, List 4, List 5

Themed Word Chop Worksheets

1. Ancient Egypt
2. Animals
3. Antarctica
4. Autumn
5. Canada
6. Cells
7. China
8. Christmas
9. Dinosaurs
10. Earth
11. Elements and Compounds
12. Environment
13. Food
14. Forces Of Nature
15. Generals of the Civil War
16. Halloween
17. Hanukkah
18. Human Body
19. Hurricane and Tornadoes
20. Insects
21. Inventors
22. Japan
23. Magnets / Electricity
24. Martin Luther King, Jr.
25. Oceans
26. Plants
27. Rainforest
28. Simple Machines
29. Space
30. Spring
31. St. Patrick's Day
32. States
33. Thanksgiving
34. Tsunami
35. Veterans
36. Volcanoes
37. Weather
38. Winter
39. Winter Olympics

4 Ways to Break Down Words into Parts

Kids learn how to pronounce and spell different words as they are growing up. From easy words with one syllable to reading multisyllabic words, they will continue to practice and understand more words daily . However, learning a new word is not easy for them if they don’t know what it means, and that requires knowing how to break a word into simpler parts. This is also called "word decoding."

Word breaking and putting together is an essential way of knowing the context of sentences that we don’t know the meaning of. For example, if children know what the prefix "dis" means, they will be able to understand how dishonest the opposite of honest is, or if they know what "fore" means, they will know that foresight means to perceive things "before" they happen.

Here are 4 ways how you can teach your kids how to break down the words into parts to help them learn the concept of understanding new words.

1. Word Roots

- Roots of words are the core around which their meaning revolves. They can be used individually or joined with a prefix or suffix to give it a new meaning.

- Teaching kids the root of the words they cannot understand will make it simpler for them.

- Roots carry most of the meaning of the word. Therefore understanding a root word will make the meaning of its derivatives easier to comprehend.

- Greek roots and Latin roots are very common. More than 60% of English words have them. The science and technology vocabulary uses them even more.

- "Acri" is a root word, has a Latin origin, and means "bitter." It is used in words like acrimony (meaning: ill-feeling) and acrid (meaning: bitter in taste).

- The Latin word "dict" means "say." It gives rise to words like dictation (meaning: giving orders) and dictator (meaning: a ruler with great power).

- Another root word, "Aqua" means "water." Words like aqueous (meaning: containing water) and aquarium (meaning: a tank of water in which fish live) derive from it.

- Other examples of root words are;

2. Prefixes and Suffixes

- Almost 82 prefixes and suffixes are used in English.

- Prefixes are affixes that are placed at the beginning of a word. For example, anti-, inter-, non-, etc. They may change the meaning of a word.

- Suffixes are words that sometimes contain grammatical information. They are placed after a word to give it a new meaning. For example, -age, -ful, -ing etc.

- Learning the meaning of prefixes and suffixes is helpful in expanding vocabulary and learning the meaning of new words with context.

- The prefix "non-" means "not." It can be used to give a negative meaning to a word. For example, "non-fiction," meaning something that is not fiction, or "non-specific," which means not exactly specific or detailed.

- Prefix "anti-" gives an opposite meaning to a word. Take the example of "anti-biotic," which means against "biotics, or living organisms". "Anti-social" means someone who is not sociable.

- The suffix "-age" gives words the appearance of a collection. For example, the word "wreck" means "destruction," but the word "wreckage" means "multitude of remains from something badly damaged."

- Adding the suffix "-ing" to a word changes the noun into a verb. "Scrub" is a noun, while "scrubbing" is a verb.

- Examples of some other prefixes;

Examples of other suffixes are as follows;

3. Phonics

- Phonics is a method by which you teach how to spell out letters by linking them to a specific symbol.

- There may be only 26 letters in the English language, but the different sounds they make can go up to 44.

- A phoneme is a small unit of sound. Some of the phonemes are; oo (cook), ar (star), g (goat), and w (wool).

- Children should be taught to decode words by seeing a letter and then saying the sound it represents.

- They should be taught individual sounds of letters first so that they can later learn to combine them to produce the sound of a word.

- There are some general phonic rules everyone should know.

- Every syllable of a word should contain at least one vowel. It can stand alone, e.g., jet, or be surrounded by consonants, e.g., napkin.

- The silent e rule states that when e is the last letter in a word, all the power goes to the other vowel present in the word, and e becomes silent. e.g., besides.

- Vowel digraph means that when two vowels are side by side, the first one says its sound, and the second one remains silent, e.g., beach. Vowel diphthong means that two vowels working together to make a new sound, e.g., cloud.

4. Breaking Down Sentences

- Apart from breaking down words, breaking sentences into smaller parts is also a helpful tool to understand the meaning of words.

- Breaking sentences into subjects, objects, verbs, and nouns is useful to know which part of the sentence has a specific meaning.

- For example, in the sentence "Amy scrubbed the floor." Amy is a subject, floor is an object, and scrub is a verb. This is a helpful technique to understand where the action is being done and who the performer is.

- Similarly, identifying prepositions like on, below, and over, are also helpful to teach them where or how the action is being performed, e.g. "The cat is sleeping on a bed," has the preposition "on," which tells us that the cat is on top of the bed, rather than below or beside it.

Breaking down words into smaller parts helps children understand how words are constructed. This makes it easier for them to comprehend and learn words that might not be part of their vocabulary.