Developing Reading Skills: For Kindergartners

According to the National Institute for Literacy, these are skills that your child should develop while in Kindergarten. These will be things for you to watch for during your child's Kindergarten year. If you seem some areas lacking, spend time on it at home. If you are homeschooling, make sure you introduce opportunities for these skills to develop.

• The child listens carefully to books read aloud.
• The child knows the shapes and names of letters of the alphabet and writes many uppercase and lowercase letters on his own.
• The child knows that spoken words are made of separate sounds.
• The child recognizes and makes rhymes, can tell when words begin with the same sound, and can put together, or blend, spoken sounds.
• The child can sound out some letters.
• The child knows that the order of letters in a written word stands for the order of sounds in a spoken word.
• The child knows some common words, like a, the, I, and you on sight.
• The child knows how to hold a book and follows print from left to right and from top to bottom of a page when read to.
• The child asks and answers questions about stories and uses what she already knows to understand a story.
• The child knows the parts of a book and understands that authors write words and text and that illustrators create pictures.
• The child knows that in most books, the main message is in the print, not the pictures.
• The child predicts what will happen in stories.
• The child can retell or act out stories.
• The child knows the difference between made up fiction and real nonfiction books and the difference between stories and poems.
• The child uses what he knows about letters and sounds to write words.
• The child writes some letters and words as they are said to her and begins to spell some words correctly.
• The child writes his own first and last name and the first names of some family members and friends.
• The child plays with words and uses new words in her own speech.
• The child knows and uses words that are important for school work, like colors, shapes, and numbers.
• The child knows and uses words from daily life, like street names and names for community workers (teacher, mail carrier, etc.)

Something that strikes me is that many of these skills are accomplished by doing the things listed in the toddler and preschooler sections (posted previously). You can see how these simple skills you teach your child when she is young help her as she gets older.