Glossary of Terms

Accuracy: Reading words correctly.

Assessment: Any teacher-administered task that provides information to the teacher about what a student knows or can do. Assessments may or may not be scored, depending on their purpose. Assessments that are not scored are typically used to inform a teacher’s future instruction.

Automaticity: Reading words accurately, quickly, and will little effort.

Content: Writing with explanations through examples, reasons, or opinions.

Writing with correct punctuation, mechanics, capitalization, and complete sentences.

Decoding: The process of blending letter sounds to read a word.

Dolch Sight Words: Words that cannot be sounded out and must be known by sight (memorized).

Encoding: The process of blending letter sounds to spell a word.

Expression: Reading with appropriate tone, natural phrasing, and attention to punctuation.

Evidence: Anything a teacher can use as an indicator of what a student knows or can do. This may include direct teacher observation, examination of student work, discussions, projects, performance tasks, quizzes and tests, etc.

Figurative Language: simile, metaphor, onomatopoeia, alliteration, personification, allusion

Focus: Writing on topic with clear ideas.

Metacognitive Thinking Strategies: Strategies that good readers use:
Summarizing: The ongoing ability to state the meaning of the text in a shortened form.
Making Inferences: The ongoing ability to make predictions using background knowledge and details from the text (picture clues, title, key words).
Monitoring Understanding: Consistent use of phonics skills to decode and the consistent checking for meaning.
Making Connections: The ongoing ability to make connections between what is read to your own life.
Questioning: The ongoing ability to create and answer questions.
Visualizing: The ongoing ability to create a picture in your head from the words on the page.
Synthesizing: The ongoing ability to make meaning from the text by using the other six thinking strategies.
Author’s Purpose: The ongoing ability to understand why the author wrote the passage.

Multisyllabic Words: Words with many syllables.

Open-Ended Questions: Questions that require students to provide written evidence from the text.

Organization: Writing with a good beginning, middle with details, definite ending, and with everything explained in order.

Progress: Continuous learning and forward movement towards meeting the standard at specific times throughout the year and at the end of each grade level.

Propaganda/Bias: Persuasive tactics used to influence people to believe, buy, or do something.
Bias is a judgment based on a personal point of view.

Reading Fluency: Reading quickly and accurately with comprehension and appropriate expression.

Rubric: A rubric is a set of criteria for student work that describes the quality of work at each level of performance. Rubrics are strong instructional tools that aide teachers in evaluating student work and have been used in schools for many years.

Six Syllable Types: These syllable types are used in the English language in order to read and spell correctly:

Closed: like in the word “mat”.
Open: like in the word “go”.
Consonant l-e: like in the word “mantle”.
Vowel Team: like in the work “plain”.
Vowel-Consonant-Silent E: like in the word “cave”.
R-Controlled: like in the word “car”.
*Schwa Sound: like in the word “basket”. *Can appear in any syllable type.

Skill: Individual building blocks that students need to master in order to show proficiency towards specific learning targets.

Standard: Grade level learning goals that define what students should know and be able to do by the end of the school year. These learning goals increase in complexity as students move from one grade level to another.

Story Elements: Character, setting, problem/resolution, climax, rising action, falling action and theme.

Style: Writing with colorful language, exact words, and a variety of sentences.
