- Academic vocabulary – tier two words that have wide application in school contexts and are used more frequently in written than oral language.
- Affix – a syllable added to the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix) of a word to change the word’s meaning.
- Antonyms – words that express opposite meanings.
- Alphabetic Principle - The idea that letters and letter patterns represent the sounds of spoken language. It is the understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds.
- Basic words – tier 1 vocabulary: common words that are used socially, in informal conversation at home and on the playground.
- Choral reading - reading in unison as a group to build fluency, self-confidence, and motivation.
- Close Reading – doing multiple readings of a text to take a closer look to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension.
- Cloze – activity in which children replace words that have been deleted from a text.
- Comprehension – it is the end goal of reading; the process of constructing meaning using both the author’s text and the reader’s background knowledge for specific purpose.
- Consonant - A speech sound that is not a vowel; the sound is produced with partial or complete closure of the air stream.
- Context Clues – information from the words or sentences surrounding a word that helps clarify the word’s meaning.
- Critical Comprehension – the third level of comprehension where readers analyze symbolic meanings, distinguish fact from opinion, and draw conclusions.
- Decoding - Translating written words into spoken words.
- Derivational Relations Spelling – fifth and last stage in spelling development. Students are exploring the relationship between spelling and meaning and learn that words with related meanings are often related in spelling despite changes in pronunciation. Latin and Greek root words and derivational affixes are taught. Concepts: consonant alternations, vowel alternations, Latin/Greek affixes and root words, etymologies.
- Diagraph - A combination of two letters representing one sound. Example: /ph/ or /ey/.
- Diphthong - A sound formed by two syllables that glide together as one. Example: "out," "oil," and "boy."
- Emergent Spelling – stage one in stages of spelling development. Children string together scribbles, letters, and letterlike forms but they don’t associate the marks with specific phonemes.
- Encoding - Translating spoken words into written words.
- Evaluative Comprehension – most sophisticated level of comprehension where readers judge the quality of text.
- Expository Text – text to inform or describe; information text (non-fiction)
- Fables – brief narratives designed to teach a moral.
- Fairytales – best-known folktale that have motifs or small recurring elements.
- Fantasies – imaginative stories
- Fluency – reading smoothly, quickly, and with expression.
- Folklore – stories that began hundreds of years ago and were passed down from generation to generation before being written down.
- Folktales – began as oral stories, told and retold by medieval storytellers (Once upon a time..)
- Genres – a category of literature such as folklore, science fiction, biography, historic fiction, etc…
- Grapheme - The smallest part of written language that represents a phoneme in the spelling of a word.
- Guided reading – students work in small groups to read as independently as possible a text selected by the teacher.
- Homonyms – words that sound alike or are spelling alike.
- Inferential comprehension – second level of comprehension where readers use clues they notice in the text, implied information, and their background knowledge to draw inferenecs.
- Interactive writing – teacher and students work together to create a text and shade the pend to do the writing.
- Language Experience Approach - A task that promotes reading and writing through the use of personal experiences and oral language. Children will speak about an experience and the teacher will write down exactly as they say.
- Letter Name-Alphabetic Spelling – second stage in spelling development. Children learn to represent phonemes with written letters. Children typically use only several letters of the alphabet to represent an entire word. Concepts: alphabetic principle, consonant sounds, short vowel sounds, and consonant blends and digraphs.
- Literacy - Production and completion of reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
- Literal Comprehension – most basic level of comprehension where readers pick out the big ideas, sequence details, notice similarities and differences, and identify explicitly stated reasons.
- Metacognition – student’s awareness of his or her own thoughts and learning process. It is knowing “what we know” and “what we don’t know”
- Morpheme - The smallest unit of a word that has meaning in a written language.
- Morphemic Analysis - A strategy used to determine or infer the meanings of word by examining their meaningful parts (i.e. prefixes, suffixes, and roots).
- Myths – used to explain natural phenomena.
- Narrative Text – the main point of the text is to tell a story; it has a beginning, middle, and end; characters; plot and conflict; and setting from the author’s imagination (fiction).
- Onset - The beginning consonant sound of a syllable. Example: /c/ in cat.
- Onset-Rime Phonics Instruction - Children learn to identify the sound of the letter(s) before the first vowel (the onset) in a one-syllable word and the sound the remaining part of the word (the rime).
- Orthography - The spelling system.
- Phoneme - The smallest unit of sound.
- Phoneme Blending - A child can put together an onset and rime that is given by the teacher. Example: /b/ and /ack/ is back.
- Phoneme Isolation - A child can recognize individual sounds in a word.
- Phoneme Manipulation - A child can work with individual sounds in spoken words; they can manipulate sounds in a word.
- Phoneme Matching - A child can identify words that being with the same sound.
- Phoneme Segmentation - A child can break words into separate parts, saying each sound as tap or count it.
- Phonemic Awareness - The awareness and ability to manipulate sounds in spoken words.
- Phonics - a teaching strategy for reading by teaching letter sounds and letter recognition.
- Phonics Analysis – children apply what they have learned about phoneme-grapheme correspondences and phonics rules to decode words.
- Phonology - The study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages.
- Print Awareness - The ability to recognize print and that it has meaning.
- Prosody – the ability to read sentences expressively with appropriate phrasing and intonation (expression, phrasing, volume, smoothness, and pacing).
- Reading - A dynamic process in which the reader interacts with the text to construct meaning. Inherent in the construction of meaning is the reader's ability to activate prior knowledge, use reading strategies and adapt to the reading situation.
- Realistic fiction – lifelike and believable; story is a representation of action that seems truthful.
- Rime - Part of a syllable which consists of its vowel and any consonant sounds that come after it.
- Rhyme - Correspondence of sound between words or the endings of words (often seen in poetry).
- Schemata – stored knowledge and its storage structure; it is an organized chunk of knowledge or experience often accompanied by feelings or emotions associated with experience at the time the information was stored.
- Sight Words - Also known as high frequency words; commonly used words young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole so they can automatically recognize them in print.
- Specialized words – tier three words that are content specific and often abstract.
- Syllables and Affixes Spelling – fourth stage in spelling development where students apply what they have learned about one-syllables words to spell longer words and break them down. Inflectional endings (-es,-ed, -ing) are also added and homonyms are differentiated. Concepts: inflectional endings, compound words, syllabication, homonyms.
- Synonyms – words that have nearly the same meaning as other words.
- Text Features – used to achieve a particular effect in writing (narrative devices).
- Text Structures – used to organize texts and emphasize big ideas. Sequencing, comparing, and cause and effect.
- Word Walls – an alphabetized chart posted in the classroom listing words children are learning.
- Within-Word Pattern Spelling – third stage in spelling development where students learn long vowel patters and r-controlled vowels. At this stage children may confuse spelling patters. Concepts: long vowel spelling patterns, r-controlled vowels, more complex consonant patterns, and diphthongs and other less common vowel patterns.
- Zone of proximal development – the distance between a child’s actual developmental level and his or her potential level that can be reached with teacher scaffolding.