Author visits:
Children's authors will often do a reading in a school and discuss
what being an author involves.
‘Buddy’ relationships:
Students are intentionally paired with a student who is younger, or older, creating
a partner group where the students are different ages.
The features of a successful buddies program are the social pairings and the
breakdown of the social barriers that exist due to grade level groupings, but,
just as important, are the kinds of learning experiences that the students can
share.
Cloze sentences: A passage with blanks from which words have been deleted.
Students are asked to predict words to demonstrate the use
of syntactic, graphophonic, and semantic cueing systems.
Cognitive stage of formal thought: The stage of cognitive development which allows people to
use abstract thought, including considering situations other
than the one that actually exists. From Jean Piaget's theory
of Cognitive Development.
Couplets:
Poetry that is written in pairs of lines that rhyme at the end.
Decoding:
The sounding out of words by syllables or phonetic means.
Expressive language:
Spoken words, sentences, and phrases that a speaker uses to articulate his or her ideas. Young children generally have an expressive vocabulary of 2,000-3,000 words when they arrive at school.
Genre:
A type or category that is distinctive in style, form, or content. For example,
reports and narratives are different genres of writing.
Haiku:
A traditional three-lined form of Japanese poetry consisting of five, seven,
and five syllables respectively.
Individualized reading: Reading from personally selected books rather than from prescribed
readers.
Interactive bulletin boards:
Bulletin boards which are meant to have communication to
and from all members of the class. Anyone can put up appropriate
material.
Kinesthetic: Tactile, based upon the sense of touch.
Learning styles:
The ways in which a person best receives information from his or her senses—visual,
auditory, or kinesthetic. The term may also relate to the way in which a person
organizes or views information.
Manipulatives:
Objects (such as buttons or Popsicle sticks) that can be moved around by students to help understand various concepts, especially mathematical ones.
Phonics:
A method of teaching people to read or pronounce words by learning the relationship between the sounds of the language and the letters or groups of letters used to represent them.
Prewriting experiences:
Experiences used by teachers to prepare students to put ideas
into words. This may include brainstorming words related to
the topic, observing pictures, or discussing emotions or situations.
Poetry café:
An event in which a room is set up with small tables as in a café, often with some refreshments. Students take turns to go to a lighted stool and read poetry, either their own or poems that they particularly like.
Post-reading activities: Activities children perform in response to material they have
read.
Reading conferences:
Meeting with individual students to discuss reading in order to evaluate reading strategies, comprehension, vocabulary, oral fluency, and responses.
Reading inventories: Tests to discover the reading levels of individual students.
Receptive language: The words, sentences, and phrases that a person understands
when others are speaking to them. Young children generally
have a higher level of receptive language than expressive language.
Story mapping:
Students draw a map outlining the plot of a story with pictures of characters
and events at appropriate places.
Whole language: A technique for teaching language arts that emphasizes the
reading of whole texts before analyzing words and individual
letter sounds. The first books used many be picture books.
The learning of skills is done in the context of meaningful
reading and writing.
Writing fair/exhibit: An event for sharing students' writing.
