Glossary

A

Academic language: Language characterized by complex narrative, sentence structure, and vocabulary. This language is acquired with opportunities to practice through repeated exposure and intentional interactions.
Alliteration: The repetition of identical or similar sounds at the beginning of words (e.g., bumbling bees).
Authentic assessment: A systematic tool to reflect on children’s learning and development in the context of their everyday routines in the learning environment. Educators engage in this practice by gathering high quality observation notes, pictures/video, and work samples that capture meaningful moments of a child’s unique development.
Autonomy: The ability of an individual to make their own decisions. For example, a child may express autonomy by crawling over to the cozy area and picking up a toy they are curious about.

B

Background knowledge: The information that children learn and store in their memories—including information about themselves, other people, objects, and the world around them.
Bias: An unfair inclination or preference either for or against an individual or group.
Biliteracy: This refers to the development of high levels of proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in more than one language.

C

Cognates: Words that have a shared root. When learning a new language, shared cognates help build a bridge between the home and acquired language. For example, in Spanish-English, some exact cognates are animal and chocolate, and similar cognates are family and familia, center and centro.
Cognitive: The ability to consciously understand, perceive, reason, and remember
Continuity of Care: An approach to childcare in which children are not moved to a new group with a new caregiver during the infancy period (first three years of life). Either the whole group moves together into more appropriate space as children get more mobile or the caregiver modifies the environment to meet the children’s changing needs. Some programs group children who are roughly the same age together and some may mix the ages of children in a group to be more like a family.
Cultural competencies: The behaviors, attitudes, and practices of a professional community that enable crosscultural communication. Development of cultural competencies is a dynamic, ongoing process and long-term commitment to learning from and about children and their families.
Culturally and linguistically responsive practice: Ways of engaging families and educating children that affirm children’s positive social and linguistic identities. Educators build their understandings of the communities in which they work, develop linguistic and cultural competencies, and actively work to reduce teacher biases in order to increase marginalized children’s educational access and equity.
Culture: A set of shared understandings or shared expectations learned consciously and unconsciously by a group of people. These patterns can be seen in language, governing practices, arts, customs, holiday celebrations, food, religion, dating rituals, and clothing.

D

Decode: Using knowledge of letter sounds or letter patterns in order to sound out words when reading.
Developmental milestones: A set of functional skills or age-specific tasks that most children can do at a certain age range.
Developmental screening: The use of standardized questionnaires and brief assessments to identify potential developmental delays in children and allow for early treatment and supportive services.
Disability: Disability refers to any condition of the body or mind that makes it more difficult for the person to function in the environment around them (e.g. ,seeing, hearing, speaking, walking, communicating, sensing, breathing, performing manual tasks, learning, working, or caring for oneself).
Documentation: Evidence of observations that include, but are not limited to, photos, anecdotes, video, and language samples.
Dominant culture: Prevalent cultural practices in a society that create the norms for expected behavior. In the United States white, patriarchal, Christian culture is dominant.

E

Educator: An adult who supports children’s learning and development (e.g., family child care provider, caregiver, or teacher).
Emergent multilingual learner: Preschool children who are learning a language other than English and who have the opportunity to become bilingual or multilingual in school.
Equity: All people getting what they need in order to have access, opportunities, and a fair chance to succeed. An equity stance recognizes that the same for everyone (equality) doesn’t truly address needs, and therefore, specific solutions and remedies, which may be different for different people, are necessary.
Ethnicity: Refers to a person’s identification with a group based on characteristics such as shared history, ancestry, geographic and language origin, and culture.
Etymology: The earliest form and use of the word traced in its chronological history.

G

Gender: The socially defined “rules” and roles for people in a society. The attitudes, customs, and values associated with gender are socially constructed. However, individuals develop their gender identities in two primary ways: through an innate sense of their own identity and through their life experiences and interactions with others. Dominant Western culture generally defines gender as a binary system—men and women—but many cultures define gender as more fluid and existing along a continuum.
Gender expression: Refers to the ways in which people externally communicate their gender identity to others through behavior, clothing, haircut, or voice and through emphasizing, de-emphasizing, or changing their bodies’ characteristics. Gender expression is not an indicator of sexual orientation.
Gender Identity: How an individual identifies in terms of their gender. Since gender identity is internal, one’s gender identity is not necessarily visible to others.

I

Implicit bias: The unconscious attitudes, stereotypes, and unintentional actions (positive or negative) toward members of a group merely because of their membership in that group. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime, beginning at a very early age, through exposure to direct and indirect messages. When people are acting upon their implicit bias, they are not aware that their actions are biased. In fact, those biases may be in direct conflict with a person’s explicit beliefs and values.
Inequity: Refers to a lack of fairness or justice; unfair and avoidable differences in treatment or experience.
Injustice: A situation in which the rights of a person or a group of people are ignored or disrespected.
Integrated curriculum: A curriculum in which learning occurs across multiple domains and/or subject areas.
Internalize: A process through which people come to identify parts of a culture as parts of themselves, especially in relation to norms and values.

L

Language variation: A regional, social, or contextual variation in the way a language in used.
Literacies: Multiple, diverse, and multilingual skills and competencies that enable communication, understanding, and access.

M

Marginalization: The set of processes through which some individuals and groups face systematic disadvantages in their interactions with dominant social, political, and economic institutions. The disadvantages arise from class status or social group identity (kinship, ethnicity, caste and race, gender, age, and disability).
Microaggressions: The everyday slights, indignities, put-downs, and insults that marginalized people experience in their day-to-day interactions. Microaggressions can seem to be a compliment but contain a hidden insult to the target groups to which they are delivered. They are often outside the level of conscious awareness of the perpetrator, which means they can be unintentional.
Morpheme: The smallest unit of meaning in an oral language.

N

Norm: Shared expectation for children’s behavior.

P

Patriarchy: A social system or organization in which power is primarily held by men, or individuals who believe men should hold the most power over all others.
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a language.
Primary caregiving: A continuity of care practice that involves assigning one primary caregiver to each child and family in the program. Sometimes it is necessary to have more than one primary caregiver if the child is in care many hours. The primary caregiver is responsible for their small group of children. They carry out most of the daily care routines and get to know the child and family well. They are responsible for this child’s records, for monitoring the child’s development, planning appropriate activities and maintaining close ties with the family.
Privilege: A term for unearned and often unseen or unrecognized advantages, benefits, or rights conferred upon people based on their membership in a dominant group (e.g., white people, heterosexual people, males, or people without disabilities) beyond those commonly experienced by members of the non-dominant group. Privilege reveals both obvious and less obvious unspoken advantages that people in the dominant group may not recognize they have, which distinguishes it from overt bias or prejudice. These advantages include cultural affirmations of one’s own worth; presumed greater social status; and the freedom to move, buy, work, play, and speak freely.

R

Race: A false, hierarchical classification system of human beings that draws on physical characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and bone structure to reinforce the idea that race is biological. However, there is no scientific basis for race.
Racism: A system of social structures that provides or denies access, safety, resources, and power based on race categories; the system produces and reproduces race-based inequities.
Rhyme: Words with similar sounding endings.

S

Sensory integration: The neurological process that organizes sensation from one’s own body and from the environment (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, proprioception, and vestibular function) and makes it possible to use the body effectively within the environment.
Sexism: Prejudice and/or discrimination against people based on their real or perceived gender. Sexism is based on an unfair belief (conscious or unconscious) that there is a natural order based on gender.
Standards: Student learning expectations: concepts all students should know and tasks all children should be able to do as a result of skilled instruction.

T

Text: Fiction and nonfiction books, magazines, brochures, and posters; various art forms such as poetry, drawing, painting, and sculpture; can also refer to multimedia and information communication technology (ICT) texts.
Translanguaging: Using a home language and English interchangeably in social communication.

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