Praxis Early Childhood Education cheat sheet

Phonological awareness is awareness of sound units (words, syllables, onsets/rimes, phonemes); phonemic awareness is the narrower ability to isolate and manipulate individual phonemes.

Phonics teaches letter-sound correspondences for decoding; phonemic awareness involves no letters and is oral/aural only.

The five pillars of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Fluency has three components: accuracy, automaticity (rate), and prosody (expression); it is the bridge from decoding to comprehension.

Alphabetic principle = letters represent sounds in speech; the continuum runs from pre-alphabetic to partial alphabetic to full alphabetic to consolidated alphabetic.

Print concepts include front/back of book, directionality (left-to-right, top-to-bottom), and the difference between letters, words, and sentences.

Invented (temporary) spelling is a developmental stage, not an error to eliminate; it moves from precommunicative to semiphonetic to phonetic to transitional to conventional.

Vocabulary tiers: Tier 1 everyday words, Tier 2 high-frequency academic words (most valuable for direct instruction), Tier 3 domain-specific terms.

Comprehension strategies include predicting, questioning, visualizing, summarizing, and monitoring; narrative text structure is setting, characters, problem, events, resolution.

Cardinality: the last number named when counting a set tells how many are in it.

One-to-one correspondence: each object counted receives exactly one number word.

Subitizing is instant recognition of small quantities (typically 1-5) without counting.

Composing and decomposing numbers: e.g., 7 = 5 + 2 = 3 + 4; fluency with sums to 10 is a primary-grade benchmark.

Place value: in a two-digit number, the left digit is tens and the right digit is ones; 34 = 3 tens + 4 ones.

Part-part-whole and comparison problem types: join, separate, part-part-whole, and compare; each has result-unknown, change-unknown, and start-unknown variants.

Standard shapes: triangle 3 sides, quadrilateral 4, pentagon 5, hexagon 6, octagon 8; a square is a special rectangle (all squares are rectangles, not vice versa).

Measurement attributes are continuous (length, weight, capacity) versus discrete (count); direct comparison precedes use of nonstandard then standard units.

Pattern types: repeating (AB, ABB) and growing (2, 4, 6, 8); classifying and sorting by one attribute precede sorting by two attributes.

Scientific inquiry cycle: observe, ask a question, predict/hypothesize, investigate, record data, and communicate conclusions.

Living things share characteristics: they grow, need energy (food/light), respond to stimuli, and reproduce; nonliving things do not.

Basic needs of animals: food, water, air, shelter; plants need light, water, air, and nutrients.

Life cycles: butterfly egg-larva-pupa-adult (complete metamorphosis); frog egg-tadpole-froglet-adult.

States of matter: solid (definite shape and volume), liquid (definite volume, takes container shape), gas (fills container); water freezes at 0 degrees C and boils at 100 degrees C at sea level.

Push/pull forces cause motion changes; heavier objects are not always faster fallers in air-free conditions, and friction opposes motion.

Earth materials: rock, soil, water, air; weather is day-to-day conditions while climate is long-term averages.

Day/night and seasons result from Earth's rotation (day/night) and revolution plus axial tilt (seasons); the Moon does not emit its own light.

Science process skills to assess: observing, classifying, measuring, inferring versus predicting (prediction is about the future; inference explains the present).

Five themes of geography: location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region.

Map elements: title, legend/key, compass rose (N, S, E, W), scale, and grid; cardinal directions versus intermediate directions (NE, SW).

Community helpers and roles: goods are made or grown, services are performed; producers and consumers are interdependent.

Family, school, and community are the expanding-circles sequence of early social studies (self, family, neighborhood, community, world).

Timeline and chronology skills: past, present, future; sequencing events and using terms like before, after, then, now.

Cultural universals include food, shelter, clothing, language, beliefs, and celebrations; comparing cultures should focus on similarities and differences without ranking.

Rules and laws exist to keep people safe and resolve conflict; citizenship behaviors include voting, obeying laws, and volunteering.

U.S. symbols and landmarks: flag, bald eagle, Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell, Washington Monument, and the national anthem.

Basic economic concepts for young children: needs versus wants, saving versus spending, trade, and scarcity (limited resources, unlimited wants).

Fundamental movement skills: locomotor (walk, run, jump, hop, skip, gallop, slide), non-locomotor (bend, twist, stretch), and manipulative (throw, catch, kick, strike, dribble).

Physical activity guideline for children and adolescents: at least 60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity daily.

Five components of health-related fitness: cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body composition.

Skill-related fitness components: agility, balance, coordination, power, reaction time, and speed.

FITT principle: Frequency, Intensity, Time, Type.

Handwashing is the single most effective way to reduce spread of infectious disease; wash with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.

Nutrition: five food groups (fruits, vegetables, grains, protein, dairy); MyPlate divides a plate roughly half fruits and vegetables.

Body safety and personal boundaries: children should know the difference between safe and unsafe touch and identify trusted adults to tell.

Locomotor skills develop in a predictable sequence from head to foot (cephalocaudal) and trunk to extremities (proximodistal).

Elements of visual art: line, shape, form, color, texture, space, and value.

Color theory basics: primary colors are red, yellow, blue (paint); mixing two primaries makes a secondary (orange, green, violet).

Elements of music: rhythm, melody, harmony, form, timbre, dynamics, and tempo.

Instrument families: strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.

Elements of dance: body, space, time, energy (the acronym BASTE includes action).

Elements of drama: character, setting, plot, conflict, and dialogue; dramatic play (pretend play) supports symbolic thinking in young children.

Process art emphasizes the child's exploration and choice; product art emphasizes a predetermined adult-directed outcome.

Stages of children's drawing: scribbling, preschematic (early representational), schematic, and realistic.

Creative arts support fine motor development, self-expression, and emergent literacy through songs, chants, and rhyming.

Piaget's stages: sensorimotor (0-2, object permanence), preoperational (2-7, symbolic thought, egocentrism, conservation lacking), concrete operational (7-11, conservation, classification), formal operational (11+).

Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child can do alone and with guidance; scaffolding supports learning within that zone.

Erikson's early stages: trust vs. mistrust (0-1), autonomy vs. shame (1-3), initiative vs. guilt (3-6), industry vs. inferiority (6-12).

Maslow's hierarchy from bottom: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization; lower needs generally must be met first.

Kohlberg's moral development: preconventional (obedience, self-interest), conventional (social approval, law and order), postconventional (universal principles).

Bronfenbrenner's ecological model: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystem.

Developmental domains: physical, cognitive, language, social-emotional; development proceeds in a generally predictable sequence but at individual rates.

Attachment styles (Ainsworth): secure, insecure-avoidant, insecure-resistant/ambivalent, disorganized.

DAP (developmentally appropriate practice) has three core considerations: what is known about child development, the individual child, and the social/cultural context.