from Teaching Our Youngest: A Guide for Preschool Teachers & Child Care & Family Providers

Some Helpful Terms to Know

Here are some terms that you may encounter as you read more about early childhood education.

Alliteration

The same consonant sounds at the beginning of words in a sentence or a line of poetry. For example, the sound of P in Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Alphabetic principle

The understanding that written letters systematically represent sounds. For example, the word big has three letters and three sounds.

Big books

Oversized books that allow children to see the print and pictures as we read them.

Cognitive development

Children's developing knowledge, skills, and dispositions, which help them to think about and understand the world around them.

Decoding

The translation of the letters in written words into recognizable sounds and combining these sounds into meaningful words.

Emergent literacy 

The view that literacy learning begins at birth and is encouraged through participation with adults in meaningful literacy-related activities.

Environmental print

Printed materials that are a part of everyday life. They include signs, billboards, labels, and business logos.

Explicit instruction

Teaching children in a systematic and sequential manner.

Experimental writing

Young children experiment with writing by creating pretend and real letters and by organizing scribbles and marks on paper.

Invented spelling

Phonemic-based spelling where children create their own non-conventional spelling.

Letter knowledge

The ability to identify the names and shapes of the letters of the alphabet.

Journals

Writing books in which young learners scribble, draw, and use their own spellings to write about their experiences.

Literacy

Includes all the activities involved in speaking, listening, reading, writing, and appreciating both spoken and written language.

Phonemes

The smallest parts of spoken language that combine to form words. For example, the word hit is made up of three phonemes (h-i-t) and differs by one phoneme from the words pit, hip and hot.

Phonics

The relationships between the sounds of spoken language and the individual letters or groups of letters that represent those sounds in written language.

Phonological awareness

The ability to notice and work with the sounds in language. Phonological awareness activities can involve work with alliteration, rhymes, and separating individual syllables into sounds.

Print awareness

The knowledge that printed words carry meaning and that reading and writing are ways to obtain ideas and information. A young child's sensitivity to print is one of the first steps toward reading.

Scaffolded instruction

Instruction in which adults build upon what children to per-form more complex tasks.

Sight vocabulary

Words that a reader recognizes without having to sound them out.

Vocabulary

The words we must know in order to communicate effectively. Oral vocabulary refers to words that we use in speaking or recognize in listening. Reading vocabulary refers to words we recognize or use in print.

Word recognition

Using any one of a number of strategies such as recognition by sight or decoding so as to figure out their meaning.