A"Affix Detector"
🔭 Big Picture: An Affix Detector is a student who can spot prefixes and suffixes quickly and use them to figure out what a word means. It’s like giving kids word x-ray vision—they see what’s added to a word and what it tells them.
🔍 Zooming In: Affix Detector is a CR Success Learning term that refers to a student who actively identifies and interprets affixes (prefixes and suffixes) to understand new or complex words. By developing morphological awareness, students learn to recognize patterns, decode unfamiliar vocabulary, and build meaning from the parts of the word—supporting stronger comprehension and vocabulary growth. Becoming an “Affix Detector” is often practiced through structured word study games and activities.
Anchor Charts
🔭 Big Picture: A simple chart or poster that shows important ideas your child is learning. It might include steps, examples, or reminders—and it stays up so they can look at it when they need help.
🔎 Zooming In: Visual tools created with students during instruction to highlight key concepts, strategies, or processes. Anchor charts serve as ongoing references that “anchor” learning, making it easier for students to recall and apply what they’ve learned.
Applied Literacy
🔭 Big Picture: Applied literacy means using reading and writing skills in real-world situations—like following instructions, writing a letter, or reading a recipe. It’s about making literacy useful and practical.
🔍 Zoom In: Applied literacy refers to the ability to use reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills across academic content areas and everyday contexts. It emphasizes the transfer of foundational literacy skills into meaningful application, supporting comprehension, communication, and problem-solving.
Assessment in Reading
🔭 Big Picture: Assessment in reading is the process of checking how well someone can read. It helps teachers see what a student knows, where they might be struggling, and what kind of help they need. Some assessments measure basic skills like recognizing letters and sounds, while others check how well someone understands what they read.
🔎 Zooming In: Assessment in reading refers to a range of tools and strategies used to evaluate a student’s reading abilities, including phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. It can be formative (ongoing checks to guide instruction), summative (evaluations at the end of a learning period), diagnostic (identifying specific areas of difficulty), or progress monitoring (tracking growth over time). Effective reading assessments provide data-driven insights that inform instruction and intervention, ensuring students receive targeted support aligned with the Science of Reading.
BBalanced Literacy
🔭 Big Picture: Balanced literacy is a way of teaching reading that combines different methods, like phonics (learning letter sounds) and whole language (using context and pictures to figure out words). It tries to give kids a mix of reading strategies but has been criticized for not providing enough direct instruction in how to sound out words.
🔎 Zooming In: Balanced literacy is an instructional approach that blends elements of phonics-based instruction with whole language methods. It typically includes components such as read-alouds, shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, and writing activities. However, it often lacks systematic, explicit phonics instruction, relying instead on cueing strategies (such as using pictures or context) that are not supported by the Science of Reading. As a result, many literacy experts and researchers advocate for a structured literacy approach that prioritizes phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
Black Line Masters (BLMs)
🔭 Big Picture: Black Line Masters (BLMs) are printable teaching materials—like worksheets, graphic organizers, charts, and templates—that teachers can photocopy and use in class. They’re called “black line” because they’re usually simple, black-and-white pages designed for easy copying.
🔍 Zoom In: Black Line Masters (BLMs) are reproducible instructional materials provided as part of a curriculum or teaching resource. Typically presented in black-and-white line format for economical photocopying, BLMs include worksheets, assessments, organizers, and activity templates. In structured literacy programs, they support lesson delivery, provide student practice, and serve as tools for formative assessment and differentiation.
CCode Knowledge
🔭 Big Picture: Code knowledge means understanding how letters and sounds work together in written language. It’s like cracking the code of reading—knowing which letters make which sounds.
🔍 Zoom In: Code knowledge is the awareness of the relationships between phonemes and graphemes, including regular and irregular spelling patterns, digraphs, vowel teams, and advanced phonics rules. This knowledge enables efficient decoding, encoding, and word recognition and is central to structured literacy instruction.
Critical Thinking
🔭 Big Picture: Critical thinking means using your brain to solve problems, ask good questions, and make smart choices. It helps students go beyond just memorizing facts.
🔍 Zoom In: Critical thinking involves analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information to form judgments and solve problems. In literacy, it supports deep comprehension, text analysis, and the ability to compare, infer, and draw conclusions from reading material.
DDASH Spelling
🔭 Big Picture: DASH Spelling is a method that helps students learn to spell by breaking words into sounds (like /d/ /a/ /sh/) and writing each sound as they say it. It’s a hands-on, sound-by-sound approach to spelling.
🔍 Zoom In: DASH Spelling is a structured, phoneme-based spelling strategy where students segment a word into individual sounds and write each sound in sequence—often using dashes to mark sound positions. This approach reinforces phoneme-grapheme correspondence and supports orthographic mapping by engaging multisensory and motor pathways, making it a key component of explicit, structured literacy instruction.
Decodable Books
🔭 Big Picture: Decodable books are specially designed books that help beginning readers practice sounding out words. They use simple words that follow the phonics rules a child has already learned, so kids can build confidence and reading skills step by step without guessing.
🔎 Zooming In: Decodable books are structured texts that align with systematic phonics instruction, containing words that follow specific spelling patterns and phonetic rules students have been explicitly taught. These books provide controlled practice in decoding, reinforcing phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondences while reducing reliance on guessing or memorization. Decodable books play a critical role in structured literacy approaches and the Science of Reading, helping students develop automatic word recognition through direct application of learned phonics skills.
EEmbedded Assessment
🔭 Big Picture: Embedded assessment happens naturally during learning. Instead of giving a test at the end, teachers check in during lessons to see how well students are understanding things.
🔍 Zoom In: Embedded assessment is ongoing, informal evaluation that occurs within instructional activities. It allows educators to monitor student progress in real time and adjust instruction as needed. Embedded assessments can include observations, discussions, written work, and performance tasks that inform instructional decisions.
GGrammar
🔭 Big Picture: Grammar is the set of rules that helps us use words correctly. It covers things like punctuation, verb tense, and how sentences are built.
🔍 Zoom In: Grammar refers to the system and structure of a language, including parts of speech, sentence construction, punctuation, and usage rules. It supports clear communication in both speech and writing. In literacy instruction, grammar is often taught alongside writing to reinforce proper language use.
HHomophones
🔭 Big Picture: Homophones are words that sound the same but mean different things and are spelled differently—like pair and pear. Learning them helps avoid mix-ups when reading or writing.
🔍 Zoom In: Homophones are words that are pronounced the same but differ in meaning, spelling, or both (e.g., to, two, too). Teaching homophones strengthens vocabulary, spelling accuracy, and comprehension by highlighting the importance of context and word meaning.
MMagnet Folders
🔭 Big Picture: Magnet Folders are interactive tools that help students learn to read and spell by using magnetic letter tiles on a foldable board. They make learning hands-on and fun, allowing students to build words and understand how letters and sounds work together.
🔍 Zoom In: Magnet Folders are multisensory instructional tools designed to enhance phonics and spelling instruction. Each folder includes a foldable magnetic board and a set of magnetic letter tiles, enabling students to engage in active, hands-on learning. By manipulating these tiles, students can practice phoneme-grapheme correspondence, word building, and decoding strategies, reinforcing their understanding of the phonetic code.
Metalanguage
🔭 Big Picture: Metalanguage is the language we use to talk about language—like knowing what a syllable or prefix is. It helps students understand how words work.
🔍 Zooming In: Metalanguage is vocabulary used to describe and discuss language and literacy concepts, such as “phoneme,” “suffix,” or “syllable.” Teaching metalanguage gives students the tools to think about and talk about reading and writing processes, supporting metacognition and deeper understanding of instruction.
Morphemes
🔭 Big Picture: A morpheme is the smallest part of a word that still has meaning. Think of it like a puzzle piece—when students learn to spot these pieces (like un-, re-, happy, or -ed), they can figure out what unfamiliar words mean.
🔍 Zooming In: A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of language. It cannot be broken down further without losing meaning. Morphemes include base words (run), prefixes (un-, re-), and suffixes (-ing, -ed, -ness). Morphological instruction helps students recognize and manipulate morphemes to support vocabulary development, decoding, spelling, and comprehension.
Morphological Awareness
🔭 Big Picture: Morphological Awareness is a child’s ability to recognize and work with parts of words—like knowing that unhappy means not happy because of the un- at the beginning. It helps kids figure out unfamiliar words by breaking them into meaningful chunks.
🔍 Zooming In: Morphological awareness is the conscious understanding of how morphemes (the smallest units of meaning) combine to form words. It includes recognizing roots, prefixes, and suffixes, and understanding how they affect word meaning and grammar. This skill is closely linked to vocabulary growth, reading comprehension, and spelling development.
Morphology
🔭 Big Picture: Morphology is the study of how words are built. It looks at the smallest meaningful parts of words—like prefixes, roots, and suffixes—to help with reading, spelling, and understanding what words mean. For example, knowing that un- means “not” can help someone figure out the meaning of words like unfinished or undo.
🔎 Zooming In: Morphology is the study of morphemes, the smallest units of meaning in language. It includes base words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes and plays a key role in vocabulary development, spelling, and reading comprehension. Explicit morphology instruction supports decoding, word recognition, and the ability to determine meanings of unfamiliar words by analyzing their structure, making it a critical component of structured literacy and the Science of Reading.
Multisensory
🔭 Big Picture: Multisensory learning means using more than one sense at a time—like seeing, hearing, and touching—to help students learn. It’s especially helpful for reading and spelling.
🔍 Zoom In: Multisensory instruction engages two or more sensory pathways (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile) to enhance learning. In literacy, this often includes tracing letters while saying sounds or using manipulatives with phonics instruction. It’s a key principle of structured literacy and benefits all learners, especially those with dyslexia.
OOrthography
🔭 Big Picture: Orthography is the system of spelling in a language. It’s about how we write words and the patterns that help us remember how they look.
🔍 Zooming In: Orthography refers to the set of conventions for writing a language, including spelling rules, letter patterns, and punctuation. In literacy instruction, orthography involves the visual memory of written words, the understanding of consistent and irregular spelling patterns, and the process of orthographic mapping, which supports fluent reading and accurate spelling.
PPhonemic Awareness
🔭 Big Picture: Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and play with the smallest sounds in words. It helps kids break words apart, put them back together, and change sounds to make new words—all without looking at letters. It’s a key skill for learning to read because it helps kids understand how spoken words connect to written words.
🔎 Zooming In: Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify, isolate, manipulate, and blend individual phonemes (the smallest units of sound) in spoken words. It is an auditory skill that does not involve printed text and serves as a foundational prerequisite for phonics instruction. Strong phonemic awareness supports decoding, spelling, and overall reading development. Research from the Science of Reading emphasizes explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness as essential for early literacy success.
Phonetic Code
🔭 Big Picture: The phonetic code is the system that links letters (or groups of letters) to sounds. Learning this code helps students sound out and spell words.
🔍 Zoom In: The phonetic code refers to the systematic relationships between graphemes and phonemes. Understanding the phonetic code enables students to decode unfamiliar words and encode (spell) words accurately. Mastery of this code is central to structured literacy and evidence-based reading instruction.
Phonics
🔭 Big Picture: Phonics is a way of teaching reading by helping people understand how letters and sounds work together. It shows how the sounds in spoken words match up with written letters, so readers can sound out words instead of just memorizing them. It’s a key skill for learning to read and spell.
🔎 Zooming In: Phonics is an instructional approach that explicitly teaches the relationship between phonemes (the smallest units of sound) and graphemes (the letters or letter combinations that represent those sounds). It provides students with systematic, structured practice in decoding words, blending sounds, and applying spelling patterns, forming a foundational component of reading instruction aligned with the Science of Reading.
Phonological Skills
🔭 Big Picture: Phonological skills are listening skills that help students hear and play with sounds in words—like rhyming, clapping syllables, or breaking a word into parts. They’re the building blocks for learning to read.
🔍 Zoom In: Phonological skills refer to a range of auditory abilities that involve recognizing and manipulating units of sound in spoken language, including words, syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes. These skills form a developmental continuum, with phonemic awareness as the most advanced level, and are foundational to decoding and spelling.
SScience of Reading
🔭 Big Picture: The Science of Reading is a body of research that explains how people learn to read. It’s based on studies from neuroscience, psychology, and education, showing that reading isn’t something our brains do naturally—it has to be taught. This research supports structured, explicit instruction in phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension to help kids become strong readers.
🔎 Zooming In: The Science of Reading refers to a comprehensive, interdisciplinary body of scientifically-based research that investigates how the brain learns to read and how best to teach reading. It encompasses findings from cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, and education, emphasizing explicit, systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This research challenges outdated approaches like balanced literacy, advocating for evidence-based practices that align with the way the brain processes written language.
Sound Spelling
🔭 Big Picture: Sound Spelling helps students spell words by listening to each sound in the word and writing down the letters that match those sounds. It’s about spelling based on how a word sounds, not how it looks.
🔍 Zoom In: Sound Spelling is a phoneme-based spelling approach that emphasizes encoding words by segmenting them into individual sounds (phonemes) and matching each sound to its corresponding letter or letter pattern (grapheme). This method supports orthographic mapping and strengthens the connection between spoken and written language, aligning with structured literacy practices.
Spelling Conventions
🔭 Big Picture: Spelling conventions are the rules that help us spell words the right way—like knowing when to double a letter or add ‘-ing’. They make spelling more predictable.
🔍 Zoom In: Spelling conventions are systematic rules and patterns that guide accurate spelling in English, including suffix rules (e.g., drop the final e), doubling rules, and use of plurals and possessives. Mastery of these conventions supports written accuracy, vocabulary development, and morphological awareness.
Syllabication Skills
🔭 Big Picture: Syllabication skills help students break words into syllables so they can read and spell them more easily. For example, “pic-nic” has two parts that make it easier to read.
🔍 Zoom In: Syllabication skills involve the ability to divide multisyllabic words into syllables based on spelling and sound patterns. Instruction includes teaching the six common syllable types and the rules for breaking words into syllables, aiding in decoding unfamiliar words and improving reading fluency.
Syntax
🔭 Big Picture: Syntax is the way we arrange words in a sentence so it makes sense. Learning syntax helps students write and understand clear sentences.
🔍 Zoom In: Syntax is the set of rules that governs the structure of sentences, including word order, sentence types, and agreement between sentence elements. In reading, understanding syntax supports comprehension and writing fluency. Explicit instruction in syntax enhances both oral and written language skills.
Sight Words
🔭 Big Picture: Sight words are words students learn to read quickly without sounding them out—like the, was, or said. These are often tricky to sound out but show up all the time.
🔍 Zoom In: Sight words are high-frequency words that students learn to recognize instantly, either because they have irregular spellings or appear so often that automatic recognition is efficient. In structured literacy, sight word instruction includes mapping phonemes to graphemes—even for irregular parts—supporting orthographic memory and reading fluency.
VVocabulary
🔭 Big Picture: Vocabulary is all the words a person knows and uses. The more words students know, the better they understand what they read and hear.
🔍 Zoom In: Vocabulary includes the words students understand (receptive vocabulary) and use (expressive vocabulary) in both oral and written communication. Explicit vocabulary instruction supports reading comprehension and academic success, especially when integrated with morphology and context clues.