Vocabulary Assessment · Grades 2–4
Base Words and Word Families Assessment
A printable assessment for grades 2-4 on finding the base word inside a longer word, adding inflectional endings, and grouping words that share a spelling pattern. Twenty-four items with a complete answer key.
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What this assessment checks
Finding the base is the first move in reading any long word, and it is assessed here in both directions:
- Stripping an ending to find the base word
- Adding -s, -ed and -ing, including the spelling changes they force
- Recognising the word family a word belongs to
How to use it
Use it in grade 2 or 3 as a check before prefixes and suffixes are introduced — a student who cannot find a base word cannot use a prefix strategy.
Reading the results
Section A is pure decomposition and should be near-perfect by grade 3. Section B mixes the skill with spelling rules on purpose — hop + ing doubles the p and smile + ed drops the e — so score the base and the spelling separately if you want a clean diagnosis. In Section C, a word family shares a rime: cat, hat, bat is a family, cat, cats, catty is not.
| Resource type | Assessment (printable PDF) |
| Grade range | Grades 2–4 |
| Items | 24 across 3 sections |
| Answer key | Included on the final page |
| Time | About 20 minutes |
| Access | Full Member |