School Age:
Kindergarten through 3rd Grade

As a kindergartner, your child:

• Begins to see him or herself as a reader
• Understands that print goes from left to right and has meaning
• Can say letters and point to letters of the alphabet
• Knows all the consonant sounds and may know the vowel sounds
• Recognizes simple words like "the", "and", "it", and "is"
• Starts to read signs, food packages, and other everyday items
• Likes being read to and has favorite books and stories
• Produces rhyming words
• Can write his or her own name

As a first grader, your child:

• Reads aloud slowly and deliberately (about 30 words per minute)
• Begins to use strategies to figure out new words
• Recognizes words at a glance. Begins to read silently
• Has a 300-500 word reading vocabulary
• Can count the number of syllables in a word
• Can blend or segment the phonemes of most one syllable words

As a second grader, your child:

• Reads about 60 words per minute
• Reads both fiction and non-fiction written for grade level
• Can sound out unknown words of one or two syllables
• Has improved comprehension
• Re-reads sentences when meaning is not clear
• Recalls facts and details from texts
• Poses possible answers to "how", "why" and "what if" questions

As a third grader, your child:

• Reads about 90 words per minute. Reads aloud with fluency and comprehension when using grade level material
• Has a good repertoire of "word attack" skills and strategies to sound out unknown words
• Can summarize major points from fiction and non-fiction stories
• Can infer word meanings from roots, prefixes and suffixes that they have been taught
• Reads many kinds of children's books
• Uses information from the story and personal knowledge to learn new words and understand stories
• Understands the themes or main ideas in what he or she reads

As you read to your child:

You can help your child in kindergarten with exercises that help develop skills in sound recognition, letter recognition, simple blending and simple rhyming. In the first and second grades, there is additional focus on the 3 primary sub-areas of reading; accuracy, fluency and comprehension. By third grade, most children are reading independently.

It is important to continue reading aloud in order to further develop essential skills with more complex reading material. When you read aloud you can read books at your child's listening level which is higher than his or her reading level. This gives you the opportunity to expand your child's vocabulary. The wonderful, unique words found in children's literature are often words we do not use in every day conversations. A large vocabulary will improve your child's comprehension as he or she reads more sophisticated books.