Suffix -tion Nominalization
Practice nominalization: act→action, collect→collection, celebrate→celebration.
Session summary (SOAP)
Stays on this screen. Nothing is saved or sent.
Mark a card Correct, Correct with cue or Incorrect and the summary writes itself here.
How to run it
Give the verb and ask for the noun, then use both in a sentence. We celebrate and the celebration was long shows what the change is for, and that is more useful than the pair alone. Watch the spelling changes as you go: celebrate drops the e, imagine changes more than that, and subtract simply adds — three different behaviours in one set.
Cueing ladder
Start at the top. Add support one step at a time.
- IndependentPresent the item and wait 5 seconds of quiet before helping.Log as correct
- HintStress the part of the sentence that changes, or point to the word ending.Log as cued
- Sentence starterSay the first half of the sentence and let the student finish it.Log as cued
- ModelSay the correct form in the whole sentence; the student repeats it.Log as cued
Adjust it
Give a sentence starter every time, and do fewer cards.
Ask for a new sentence of the student's own with the same form, with no card to lean on.
Matching IEP goal
Given sentence cards, Student will produce the target grammatical form in sentences in 8 of 10 opportunities across 3 consecutive sessions, given no more than an indirect cue.
Send it home through the parent portal →About this activity
Twelve verbs turned into nouns with -tion: act and action, collect and collection, celebrate and celebration, inform and information, create and creation, invent and invention, subtract and subtraction, imagine and imagination. Nominalisation is the machinery of academic writing — the ability to turn an action into a thing you can talk about.
What to listen for
Listen for the stress moving. Celebrate and celebration put the stress in different places, as do inform and information, and a student who says CEL-e-bra-tion has the morphology and not the phonology. Watch imagination, the longest here, which changes the base considerably and is the one students most often cannot produce.
Carrying it home
Academic words in homework are full of these. Asking what verb is inside information or subtraction takes five seconds and makes a long word shorter — which is the point of morphology instruction in one sentence.
What's in this activity
- act → action
- collect → collection
- celebrate → celebration
- inform → information
- educate → education
- create → creation
- direct → direction
- connect → connection
- invent → invention
- decorate → decoration
- subtract → subtraction
- imagine → imagination
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Third through sixth, as academic morphology work.
- Do I need to sign in?
- No, all twelve pairs play free.
- Why does nominalisation matter?
- Because it is how academic writing works. Turning an action into a noun lets a writer make it the subject of a sentence, and students who cannot do it write in a register that reads as much younger.
Use this board with your caseload
With a free account, every correct, cued and incorrect mark is saved to the student and scored against their IEP goal, with the data written up for you. Assign it as home practice through the parent portal.
Track progress freeFree for SLPs. No card, no trial clock.