Word Families
About This Worksheet
This Grade 7 Language Arts worksheet helps students build related words from a shared base word. Students create nouns, adjectives, and person nouns from words such as create, decide, migrate, and explain. They also practice choosing the correctly spelled form of a word when several related options are given. For example, create can become creation as a noun and creative as an adjective.
Learning Goals
The main goal is to help students understand how roots and suffixes work together to form new words. Students should already recognize common parts of speech such as nouns and adjectives. This activity moves them toward choosing the correct derivational form based on both spelling and sentence meaning. It supports CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.7.4 and CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.7.6, which focus on determining word meaning and using grade-appropriate academic vocabulary.
Student Tasks
On this worksheet, students will create related word forms from four base words. They will complete noun, adjective, and person-noun forms where appropriate, then select correctly spelled words inside complete sentences. The final section asks students to choose two new base words and make two derivations from each one. They must also use one of the new forms correctly in a sentence.
Common Challenges
Some students may understand the meaning of a word family but spell the ending incorrectly. Others may choose a correctly spelled word that does not match the job needed in the sentence. Changes such as dropping a final letter or adding -tion, -ive, or -ant can be especially tricky. Encourage students to identify the needed part of speech before deciding which spelling fits.
Teaching Suggestions
A teacher can build one word family on the board and label each form by its job. Students can then discuss what changes in spelling when a suffix is added. At home, a parent can say the base word aloud and ask the child to use two related forms in different sentences. This gives practice with spelling, meaning, and grammar at the same time.
Worksheet Features
The worksheet combines word building, multiple-choice spelling, and original sentence writing. A small set of base words keeps the task focused while still showing several common derivational patterns. The final open-ended section gives students a chance to apply the process independently. This page works well for morphology practice, vocabulary development, homework, or spelling review.