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Sight Vocabulary Words: Are those words that a reader can recognize automatically and instantaneously during the process of reading.

Reading Vocabulary Words: The student may not be able to automatically recognize the word in print, but does know the referent meaning behind the word.

Sight Words:  Those words they have memorized and are able to recognize automatically.
(Cohen)

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Vocabulary development, along with reading and writing, is very important in a student's literacy development, and for student's "to become successful readers, students need to be engaged in the essential components of a balanced reading program that include various opportunities for teaching vocabulary, including direct instruction; active and deep processing of work meanings; multiple contextual situations; and practice applying these newly learned vocabulary words through reading and writing activities" (Cohen, pg. 231).

In order for students to be able to read and write, they also need to know their vocabulary terms, and what those terms mean, and their use, which is important and is base knowledge for a student to grow off of for the rest of their educational life and their public life.

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A project for vocabulary development that students can do is a triangle project like this above, where the student needs to find the part of speech, definition, and its use, to fully understand a vocabulary word.

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Fluency: When teachers and students read with expression in their voices and sound natural, like they are talking. The most critical factor leading to fluency in reading is the ability to recognize letters, spelling patterns, and whole words effortlessly, automatically, and visually. (Cohen)

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Fluency is described as being "the most critical factor leading  to fluency in reading is the ability to recognize letters, spelling patterns, and whole words effortlessly, automatically, and visually" (Cohen, pg. 173).

Fluency is important for the reason that students can read and speak clearly and naturally, especially while reading different texts out loud while in class or in the student's personal life, and there are many different tools and ways that students can help work on their fluency in school, as well.

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To also help with vocabulary development, in the classroom there can be a "Word Wall," shown above, where the teacher can display all of the words students will learn over the school year.

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Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel
- When students are moving into older elementary grades, there is a shift for students to read out loud fluently, and this book is a great guide for students to begin this step with common sight words and sentence structures.

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Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor
- This book is another example of a book focused on fluency, since it begins to integrate more uncommon sight words for students to begin to practice with while reading out loud.

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Children's Literature: Children's literature is any story, book, or written document that is targeted to young children and young adults, for their information and enjoyment of reading, from all genres from fiction to nonfiction and everything in between. (Cohen)

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Children's literature is a very important element of a classroom and in a young student's life, and "quality children's literature [should be easy] for the teacher to read aloud to the class [and be] informational books that cover many different content areas" (Cohen, pg. 51).

When children begin to learn how to read and comprehend, they will want to read more and more. When a teacher has many appropriate books of all topics for students to read independently, partnered, or out loud by a teacher, this helps promote literacy within the classroom.

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Integrating Technology Into The Literacy Classroom: Integration of technology into the curriculum is an integral part of the balanced literacy classroom through collaborating online with other schools, researching deep and relevant topics of interest, and using technological tools that promote creativity and problem solving. (Cohen)

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Reader's Workshop: Is similar to writing workshop in which students work on their reading skills, with the help of different activities such as independent reading, partnered reading, and when the teacher reads out loud to the class, which can be done in different sections of the classroom and time, but the main focus is all on books and reading.

Reader's Centers: This is a great way to support structured but more relaxed settings for children to work and read during the school day, and it allows students to also work together in their reading through different comprehension and reading activities which are creative and from a hands on approach. (Cohen)

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Comprehension Strategies: Are specific procedures that guide students to become aware of how well they comprehend as they attempt to read and write. (Cohen)

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Early Childhood Literacy Development: This development of literacy is a growing process, where teachers work with student differences to help support and teach students about. literacy, reading, and writing, which is extremely important for a student's future, and promotes language proficiency from a young age. (Cohen)

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Phonemic Awareness: An understanding of phonemic awareness, that is, spoken words are made up of individual sounds that can be manipulated, the sound of a letter individually. (Cohen)

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Phonics: Focusing on smaller amounts within words to fully understand those groups of letters, and matching sounds with letter groups to say out loud, understand them, and be able to reproduce them.

Phonic Patterns: Are the language sounds represented by written letters or graphemes.

Structural Patterns: Affixes, like prefixes and suffixes, added to root words to change their meaning.

Syllabic Patterns: Are the groupings of vowels and consonants that indicate syllabication. (Cohen)

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Read Alouds: When a teacher or a student reads out loud, enables thinking about the story events to make predictions and teaching skills and strategies while reading.

Guided Reading: The teacher will work with small groups of students or one on one with a student who is struggling with a certain aspect of reading.

Shared Reading: Working with a partner or the whole class in reading the same book or text that is assigned.

Independent Reading: Where the student reads on their own independently and are able to complete the book and answer comprehension questions about the book. (Cohen)

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Writing Supports Literacy Processing: Reading and writing are interconnected, students need both in order to become successful in both reading and writing.

Writing Workshop: Another useful tool in creating writing time for students to really write, review their writing, and make themselves better writers for the future. (Cohen)

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Phonics are important to a student's vocabulary, reading, and writing skills for "when children come across a word they do not know during reading, they must have tools to unlock. the pronunciation and meaning of this word. Word identification strategies provide children with those tools to help them decode words" (Cohen, pg. 181).

When students have strong word identification strategies, they utilize phonics as one of their tools in understanding all sorts of words that students will encounter in their school day and in their daily life, which ultimately helps students decode words to better understand them.

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The Bug in the Jug Wants a Hug by Brian P. Cleary
- This book is helpful when students are first learning about phonics because the story focuses on one specific sound all throughout the story so students get the repetition of small word sounds.

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This graphic organizer can be helpful to young students who are learning about the alphabet and the sounds that letters make, seeing a base ending of a word but adding different letters to the beginning to make different rhyming words.

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Being in a 21st century classroom, technology is used all around us, so it will be integrated into the classroom in many educational ways, such as "electronically supported reading, electronically supported writing, electronic communication, electronic literacy assessment, speech to text technology, [and] social networking" (Cohen, pgs. 32-33).

Using technology in the classroom can be extremely beneficial for all students, especially those who may have special needs or ELLs, where they have different programs that students can use as a support and educational tool in the classroom.

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Types of reading in the classroom range from all styles of reading, for example, "one type of literacy experience well suited for the whole class is reading aloud, where the teacher reads a book or text aloud to the whole class" (Cohen, pg. 61).

Read aloud is one type of reading, where others can be shared reading and independent reading, which all should be incorporated in the classroom for different types of reading that students can use and then practice with each other in the classroom.

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Audio Books are a great way to integrate technology into the classroom in relation to reading and writing, so students can listen to what they are reading while reading along in a book.

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This is an example of "Shared Reading," or Partnered Reading when students both work together in reading the same book together, where they work together to reach full understanding of a text.

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The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
- This book and many others by Dr. Seuss are classic books in the children's literature genre, involving fun and interesting plots, cute characters, easy reading, and a meaningful message all intermixed within a story.

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From the Cohen text, the National Reading Panel has cited and "identified five key areas of reading instruction that it claims must occur in the literacy classroom: 1. Phonemic awareness, 2. Phonics, 3. Vocabulary, 4. Fluency, [and] 5. Text comprehension" (Cohen, pgs. 22-23).

These areas are crucial and beneficial to early childhood literacy development for they reach and support each area of reading, writing, and language that students will be learning in school and using for the rest of their lives.

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Reader's workshop and centers help incorporate the different aspects of reading, such as independent reading, which allows students to "have a comfortable place to read independently and have a wide variety of texts to choose from including books, poetry, magazines, manyals, reference material, charts, maps, informational books, directions, recipes, and children's work" (Cohen, pg. 76).

When teacher's create an atmosphere of learning and enjoyment in reading, more and more students will find topics and stories they like to read and continue reading, finding more and more that they like, reinforcing the ideas of reading literacy.

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Comprehension strategies can be used in all aspects of reading for students, and it "synthesizes this instruction back into a new whole based on application and transfer of learning into authentic reading and writing experiences" (Cohen, pg. 30).

There are many comprehension strategies that students can use in the classroom, and many activities that students can apply after reading a text as well, from projects, to worksheets, and graphic organizers that describe the who, what, where, when, and why of a text.

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From a young age, student's begin to work with phonemic awareness by teaching themselves "phonemic awareness, phonics generalizations, and even develop an awareness that words and writing convey meaning that can be written down and understood by other children and adults" (Cohen, pg. 132).

Within phonemic awareness, student's begin to experiment and practice with inventive spelling, which is where students will try to write words that they are sounding out, but they are not spelled correctly. Even though the student is not spelling correctly, they are trying to get across a word that they are spelling, which when explained and broken down a teacher or parent can begin to understand.

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Writing as a process and writing workshop are incredibly important and valuable to a student's education, especially when teachers sit down and they begin to model "the process of writing; they need to listen to and learn from young writers. Writing becomes a process that all can engage in, share, learn from, and ultimately, enjoy" (Cohen, pg. 372).

When teachers promote writing skills as much as they do reading skills, students will begin to see the correlation between reading and writing and how both are so valuable to a student's education, as well as their future to be able to communicate with others in all forms.

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Interactive websites, like Starfall, pictured above, are great ways to integrate technology into the classroom, while being educational with reading and writing activities to complete.

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Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems
- This book is a great book for teachers to read aloud to their students, for there is a lot of focus on fluency and oral reading skills that students can turn around and model in their own reading.

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This quote by Goethe is an important idea, as children's literature is not only read by children, but adults as well who are reading it out loud to their child, so it is important for these stories to be appealing to all ages.

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When students begin to work on their literacy development from a young age, they will be stronger readers and writers as they grow and progress throughout school and in a student's life.

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The Best Story by Eileen Spinelli
- This is a great story to help students see that writing can come from their own life and experiences to use in writers workshop.

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There are many different comprehension strategies that students can use while reading, like inferencing, asking questions, and monitoring understanding as some examples from the chart above.

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Readers workshop is equally important to writers workshop, in the way that students get to spend independent time working on their own independent reading or partnered reading with a classmate.

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Fee, Fie, Phonemic Awareness by Mary Hohmann
- This book is helpful to preschool and kindergarten aged students who are still learning about the alphabet and the individual sounds that letters make.

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Early childhood literacy development is extremely important, and is influenced by all people involved in a child's life, from parents, siblings, family, friends, and teachers who all help promote literacy development in a child.

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One Day by Rebecca Kai Dotlich
- This story is essentially story writing prompts that the teacher can use to help incorporate writing as a process in conjunction with reading stories.

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Students can use a physical activity and ball to pass around the classroom, and whatever part of the ball they get they have to use as a prompt to base their comprehension of whatever text they have written off of, which helps show the teacher the student's understanding of a text.

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Reading centers can be very beneficial to students, as they have different settings within the classroom to designate to reading and making it a meaningful experience.

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This graphic organizer of letters and sounds is helpful to students when they are beginning to learn about the alphabet and the sounds that individual letters make, then to see how those individual letters blend together to make a word.