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Connecting with School Staff about Literacy

Professional contact between your program staff and school-day literacy leaders — like reading specialists, reading coaches, special education teachers or the library media specialist — promotes the healthy transfer of ideas, information and skills. Most likely, the schools your students attend have a very clear mandate about developing literacy skills.

Schools typically have a wealth of information about the reading and writing abilities of the children they serve. Your staff can become better prepared to support literacy development by engaging in dialogues about good reading and writing practice and identifying individual or small group needs that can be used to inform your planning.

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My Notebook

Literacy

The Notebook is a useful way to jot down notes as you go through the various topics available on the You For Youth website. If you'd like to use the notebook, please sign in if you already have an account or register now to join the Y4Y community!

Glossary

Literacy

Reading words in text with no errors. Part of fluency.
Strategies that require the reader to actively transform key information in text that has been read (e.g., summarizing, retelling).
The repetition of the initial sound of each word in a string of text (e.g., Harry the happy hippo hula-hoops with Henrietta).
Reading without conscious effort or attention to decoding.
Forming connections between the text and the information and experiences of the reader.
Strategies employed to emphasize the importance of preparing students to read text (e.g., activate prior knowledge, set a purpose for reading).
Understanding what one is reading, the ultimate goal of all reading activity. It is a complex process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning while reading text.
The act of deciphering a new word by sounding it out.
Strategies that help students engage the meanings of a text (e.g., asking questions at critical junctures; modeling the thought process used to make inferences; constructing mental imagery).
Reports factual information (also referred to as informational text) and the relationships among ideas. Expository text tends to be more difficult for students than narrative text because of the density of long, difficult, and unknown words or word parts.
Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression. Fluency provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.
A phrase or expression that differs from the literal meaning of the words; a regional or individual expression with a unique meaning (e.g., it’s raining cats and dogs).
A feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes a student want to complete a task or improve his or her skills
In a syllable, the onset is the initial consonant or consonants, and the rime is the vowel and any consonants that follow it (e.g., the word sat, the onset is “s” and the rime is “at”. In the word flip, the onset is “fl” and the rime is “ip”).
Refers to the act of speaking and listening. These skills are the foundation of learning to read and write.
The smallest unit of sound within our language system. A phoneme combines with other phonemes to make words.
The ability to notice, think about, or manipulate the individual phonemes (sounds) in words. It is the ability to understand that sounds in spoken language work together to make words. This term is used to refer to the highest level of phonological awareness: awareness of individual phonemes in words.
The study of the relationships between letters and the sounds they represent; also used to describe reading instruction that teaches sound-symbol correspondences.
These are words that are recognized immediately. Sometimes sight words are thought to be irregular (words that contain letters that stray from the most common sound pronunciation; words that do not follow common phonic patterns), or high frequency words (e.g., the Dolch and Fry lists).
During shared read aloud, teachers reveal their thinking processes by verbalizing: connections, questions, inferences, and predictions.
Vocabulary is the knowledge of words and word meanings in both oral and print language and in both expressive (speaking and writing) and receptive (listening and reading) forms.