You will find the following words used in classroom letters to parents, narratives at progress reporting time and on our language arts reading and writing continuum. comprehension skills -  previewing, predicting, inferring, comparing and contrasting, reading, self-monitoring, summarizing, identifying the author's purpose, and recognizing and applying figures of speech (many of these skills are part of our "Habits of Mind" - also called the "Intellectual Skills") conventions -  accepted practices in spoken, written, or visually represented language descriptive -  characterized by careful observation, using specific words and sensory images to convey meaning expository -  intended to explain or discuss a concept or theme, teach a process, analyze a situation or problem, or investigate an idea, event or individual figures of speech - poetic or imaginative language, including similes, metaphors and personification five finger rule -  a strategy to help students select a developmentally appropriate text based on their familiarity with vocabulary.  If after examining a page and five words cannot be pronounced by the reader then the book is likely too difficult for independent reading genre -  classification of works by form, style or content- categories include novels, short stories, poems, dramas, or factual/non-fiction subcategories include mysteries, romances, science fiction, tall tales, folk tales and essays literary elements -  character, setting, plot, theme, point of view, style, tone, conflict, resolution, symbolism and figurative language narrative -  characterized by a sequence that tells a fictional or factual story reading strategies -  reading carefully, correcting if necessary, connecting to prior knowledge, integrating the new with the old, making choices, recognizing organizational patterns, post-reading, skimming or scanning story map -  a strategy for presenting a story in a visual format, used to aid reading comprehension and to facilitate the writing process synthesize -  to identify and merge the relationships among ideas or texts vocabulary skills -  the identification of word structures (prefixes, suffixes and root words), syllabication, parts of speech, and word meaning and usage webbing -  an organizational/planning strategy to generate and categorize ideas word recognition -  using strategies such as context clues, picture clues, phonemic awareness, and word origins;  additionally, the identification of the form, pronunciation and meaning of a word previously read or heard writing process -  the complex act of producing written communication, including planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing a text