Child Development Tracker: Literacy From Age 5 to 6

Print Awareness and Concepts

• By the end of this year, knows that space separates printed words. Many children are familiar with common punctuation marks (e.g., "?," "!," and ".") and know that these are not letters. During this year, many children begin to understand the differences between uppercase and lowercase letters.

• Speech to print relationships are understood well enough by many children to allow them to begin to fingerpoint read words in familiar books. As they do this, they use the correct left to right and top to bottom direction of accessing print, they know that spaces separate words in print, they can isolate the first sounds in words in the texts they have memorized, and they can link these sounds to the letter or letters they know represent them. Some children attempt to read unfamiliar words by sounding out their letters.

Writing

• Continues to improve letter formation. Most children use conventional line segments in the letters they write, and many children are beginning to use correct sequences and direction of movement when they create a letter. A few children continue to struggle with letter formation.

• Letter-like designs, or mock letters, have virtually disappeared, except in play contexts where children need to create a lot of writing quickly. During such play, children know the marks are "pretend," and not real writing.

• Fine motor skills continue to influence the quality and size of writing marks for a few children. Many children now have a grip that is pretty close to a mature tripod, and they use fingers flexibly to control the writing tool.

• A child's lack of knowledge of letters (visual images), and lack of experience in mark making, continue to be the major factors that distinguish children with considerable skill in forming letters from children with less skill.

• During this year, most children establish the habit of returning to the left to begin a new line of print. Many children begin to put space in between words in phrases and sentences they write.

• Increases understanding of the uses for writing. Writes stories, notes to friends, labels for displayed artwork, observations of science phenomena, and creates print props needed for play (e.g., tickets, menus, signs). Expands knowledge of various formats of writing needed in different contexts, and adds appropriate details to own writing (e.g., category headings for items on a menu, author and illustrator listed for a story, date of observation entered with notes about a science project, items in a list might be numbered).

• Invented spelling (i.e., phoneme based sounding out, and representation of these sounds, without regard for the correct spelling) is the dominant strategy of most children during this year.

• Repertoire of known spellings (sight words) increases (e.g., the, to, for, it, and, was, stop, go, on, up, at, cat, dog).

• A few children (usually those who have begun to read) may stop inventing spellings, given that incorrect spellings of common words do not look right to them. They may ask for most spellings rather than attempt to create them. If helped by adults, these children will start to learn orthographic rules for English (e.g., "a final silent e marks the vowel preceding the consonant as a tense rather than lax vowel", "when a vowel is doubled, the tense pronunciation of the vowel is used").

• During this year, most children develop skills in composing simple fictional stories with a setting, characters, events, and a problem to be solved. Most children also develop skills in composing information that they have obtained from observation, or in composing summaries of information that they have gathered about something.

• Some children do most of their own writing of messages they compose, but many children need adult assistance with messages that are longer than a few sentences. If assistance is not readily available, the child then greatly reduces the length and complexity of messages so that he or she can cope with the physical writing task.

Alphabet Knowledge

• By the end of this year, almost all typical children know their uppercase letters and most lowercase letters. For many children, recognition and naming of uppercase is very rapid by the end of this year, as is the naming of many lowercase letters.

• By the end of this year, the majority of children can clearly distinguish letters with similar shapes, and have a good understanding that letters represent a specific sound or sounds in spoken words. (They have acquired the insight known as the "alphabetic principle.") Many children know some specific sound-letter associations, especially those with a letter name-sound match (e.g., d for /d/, m for /m/). Some children have learned sound-letter associations that are not based on letter name knowledge (e.g., use of "ch," "sh," and "th" to represent specific sounds).

• Learning the alphabet can be encouraged by alphabet exposure in kindergarten in the form of games, explicit instruction, and continued involvement in a wide range of writing activities. Other stimulation may include continued use of alphabet books, exposure to word "families," and adult modeling of the spelling of words, including the spellings for sounds that do not have a letter-name match (i.e., "th," "wh," "sh," "ch," etc.).

Copyright 2002-2007 Public Broadcasting Service. Reprinted from www.pbsparents.org with persmission of the Public Broadcasting Service.

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