emergent literacy: a concept that supports learning to read in a positive home environment where children are in the process of becoming literate from birth. It assumes children are always becoming readers are writers and that they are born ready to learn about literacy and continue to grow in their understandings throughout life
scaffolding instruction: teachers model strategies step-by-step and explicitly demonstrate the processes of thinking before, during, and after one reads. Next, teachers provide the students with guided practice in the strategies, followed by independent practice and application.
storybook experiences: this includes read-aloud and read-alongs, interactive writing, rereadings of favorite texts, and independent reading and writing. These help accomplish numerous instructional goals:
interactive writing: A shared writing activity in which children are invited to volunteer to write parts of a story
linguistic awareness: understanding the technical terms and labels needed to talk and think about reading
print awareness: this refers to a child’s understanding of the nature and uses of print. A child’s print awareness is closely associated with his or her word awareness or the ability to recognize words as distinct elements of oral and written communication.
concept of print: this refers to the awareness of ‘how print works’. This includes the knowledge of the concept of what books, print, and written language are, and how they function. It encompasses a number of understandings that allow the reading process to take place including:
- understanding that print conveys a message
- knowledge about book orientation and directionality of print, and distinction between sentences, words and letters
- knowledge of the alphabetic system and the difference between letters and words.
assessing concept of print: this is usually done by using the “Concepts About Print Test” developer by Marie Clay. It can help answer the question: “to what degree does this student possess reading-related concepts and linguistic abilities l considered to be essential in learning to read?” This is usually introduced to a child in a subtle way using basic questioning.
phonemes: The smallest unit of sound represented in written language
alphabetic principle: a principle suggesting that letters in the alphabet map to phonemes (sounds)
phonics: written language
phonemic awareness: an understanding that speech is composed of a series of written sounds
phonological awareness: The ability to hear, recognize, and play with the sounds in our language. It involves hearing the sounds of language a part from the meaning
alliteration: the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables
EX. Shelly sells sea shells
rimes: The part of the letter pattern in a word that includes the vowel and any consonant that follows
EX. SPORT: “sp” is onset, “ort” is rime
phonological awareness continuum: phonological awareness skills that develop over time from the simplest to the most complex. These include:
- phoneme matching
- blending
- segmentation
- manipulation
- Produce groups of words that begin with the same initial sound
- Blend syllables to say a word or segment spoken words into syllables
orthographic system: the system of writing conventions used to represent spoken English in written form that allows readers to connect spelling to sound to meaning
phoneme isolation: the ability to isolate sounds in a word
phoneme identity: the ability to recognize common sounds in different words
phoneme categorization: The ability to look at a small sequence of similar words and identify the word that has a different or “odd” sound compared to the rest of the words
blending: the ability to string together the sounds that each letter stands for in a word
segmenting beginning and ending sounds: the ability to group the beginning sound of a word, and group the end sound of a word
Ex. SEGMENT = /s/ egment /t/
phoneme deletion addition and substitution: the ability to take a phoneme in a word and either delete it, add to it, or substitute it to make a new word
Elkonin boxes: an instructional method used in the early elementary grades especially in children with reading difficulties and inadequate responders in order to build phonological awareness by segmenting words into individual sounds
phonemic segmentation: The ability to isolate and identify sounds in words
schema: mental frameworks that humans use to organize and construct meaning
Classroom application
I liked this chapter a lot because it was a refresher! This content is the foundation of teaching and learning to read and write. So, I will be working with this content for the rest of my career. I need all the refreshers I can get so this becomes a second language to me!
Payge Rivord 