Greek and Latin Roots Worksheets for 5th Grade
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Skill: Using common Greek and Latin roots to work out the meanings of words
Teaching tips and what to try next
Aimed at fifth graders comfortable with prefixes and suffixes from Prefixes and Suffixes. Building a root wall where each new word gets added under its root keeps the meanings visible for weeks. Science and social studies textbooks are full of these words, and Similes and Metaphors or Idioms: What Do They Mean? continue the work on word meaning.
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About this worksheet
Thousands of English words are built from a small set of Greek and Latin roots. Once a child knows that port means carry, words like transport, portable and export start to make sense on their own. Fifth graders are expected to use common Greek and Latin roots as clues to the meaning of a word, and this fifth-grade vocabulary worksheet practices fourteen of the most useful ones.
Each of the fourteen sentences names a root and two familiar words that contain it, such as telephone and telescope for tele, or inspect and spectator for spect. Children choose the meaning of the root from three choices and write it on the line. The roots are port, tele, graph, spect, aud, rupt, struct, phon, bio, dict, geo, tract, photo and chron. Each root appears once, and the correct choice moves around in the parentheses, so children have to think about what the two example words share.
How to use it: for each root, ask your child what the two example words have in common. A telephone carries sound far away, and a telescope lets you see far away, so tele must mean far. After the page, choose two or three roots and brainstorm more words that use them, then check the words in a dictionary. Keeping a small root list in a notebook helps the meanings stick.
The answer key gives the meaning of every root. For word parts at the beginning and end of words, try our Prefixes and Suffixes worksheet. For more figurative and tricky language, try our Similes and Metaphors worksheet.