Duct Duc Duce is a -ct root game played like Go Fish. One card contains the root meaning and the matching card contains the -ct root. The deck can be divided into two smaller decks, one blue the other orange, for more manageable instruction as the meanings are being introduced. Don’t worry if you aren’t sure of the meanings, it includes a cheat sheet!
I recently was asked, How did you decide these are the important roots to teach? Is it by highest frequency? I thought I would share my response as a few of you may be wondering about the value of teaching -ct roots!
Good question...
So I wanted to start teaching morphology as early as possible. It dawned on me that in the Sonday System teachers teach the end blend -ct. It was a great time to talk about a few meanings without having to write multisyllabic words. Act means to set in motion, talk about acting, action, and so on. With duct, I love the duct tape story, and tract, to pull, is fun too; a tractor pulls farm machinery!
As we get into prefixes -ct roots offer so many options for dictation, inject, reject, and eject are a few multisyllabic words easily taught with morphological division.
The next place I found knowing -ct was so helpful was once introducing -ed. I have few errors with my students confusing words like ducked and duct!
The next great thing about -ct roots is the smooth transition to -ion (tion), as in predict to prediction!
I thought a go-fish style of game could accelerate the number of roots I could teach, hence Duc, Duct, Duce!
Skills incorporated: morphological decoding, phonological decoding, vocabulary, automaticity.