The < wash > Family

I'm working on introducing SWI with the little girl who only wants to read books about pigs. So we started with Small Pig by Arnold Lobel and the word < pigpen >. She loved drawing a pigpen and it was a good chance to talk about how large words can be built of smaller recognizable words.

In SWI (Structured Word Inquiry), we show a base by making a fist, and show a compound word as being built of two bases (fists) beside one another. For fun, as part of this introductory lesson, you can also brainstorm many compound words and make them with your fists.

To move on to the idea of a morphological family as consisting of words that are built on the same base, word sums, and affixes (prefixes, suffixes, connecting vowel letters), I decided to read Hogwash by Arthur Geisert.

You could lay a hula hoop on the ground, make a Word Bag with words on index cards, and play "In the Family / Not in the Family" by having the children choose a word card, place it INSIDE the hula hoop (in the family), OUTSIDE the hula hoop (not in the family), or ON the rim of the hula hoop (not sure).

Here are some words I've thought of that are built on the base < wash >:

wash + er

wash + ing

wash + cloth

wash + er + woman

wash + able

un + wash + ed

wish + y + wash + y

wash + board

wash + room

car + wash

mouth + wash

eye + wash

white + wash

out + wash

hog + wash

You can decide whether you want to do open compounds with your student, so washing soda or washing machine may be in your word list or not, depending.

A Word Bag typically has a few foils. These are words that are not in the family. They either share a meaning relationship but not a spelling relationship... or they share a spelling relationship but not a meaning relationship. Some foils here might be < soap >, < waves >, or < mash >.

This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!