What Literacy Knowledge Young Children Should Acquire Before the First Grade

To prepare young children for the challenge of learning to read, they need to acquire certain knowledge about literacy. In order to qualify these abilities and skills, the National Academy of Sciences published a research-based report titled Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children (Snow et al., 1998). This document presents a list of accomplishments that successful learners should exhibit by the end of kindergarten. As with any list of accomplishments, it is neither exhaustive nor all-inclusive, but it does capture some of the essential aspects of literacy acquisition. The timing of these accomplishments will vary among children. However, these abilities are important because they provide teachers of young children with an understanding of what children need to learn before they embark on formal reading instruction. Children should have accomplished the following by the end of kindergarten:

• Know the parts of a book and its functions
• Begin to track print when listening to a familiar text being read or when rereading one’s own writing
• “Read” familiar text emergently, that is, not necessarily verbatim but from the print alone
• Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters
• Understand that the sequence of letters in a written word represents the sequence of sounds (phonemes) in a spoken word (alphabetic principle)
• Learn many, though not all, one-to-one letter-sound correspondences
• Recognize some words by sight, including a few very common ones (“the,” “I,” “my,” “you,” “is,” and “are”)
• Use new vocabulary and grammatical constructions in one’s own speech
• Make appropriate switches from oral to written language styles
• Notice when simple sentences fail to make sense
• Connect information and events in texts to life and life experiences
• Retell, reenact, or dramatize stories or parts of stories
• Listen attentively to books the teacher reads to class
• Name some book titles and authors
• Demonstrate familiarity with a number of types or genres of text (e.g., storybooks, expository texts, poems, newspapers, and everyday print, such as signs, notices, and labels)
• Correctly answer questions about stories read aloud
• Make predictions on the basis of illustrations or portions of stories
• Demonstrate understanding that spoken words consist of sequences of phonemes
• Given spoken sets like “dan, dan, den,” identify the first two as the same and the third as different
• Given spoken sets like “dak, pat, zen,” identify the first two as sharing one same sound
• Given spoken segments, merge them into a meaningful target word
• Given a spoken word, produce another word that rhymes with it
• Independently write many upper- and lowercase letters
• Use phonemic awareness and letter knowledge to spell independently (invented or creative spelling)
• Write (unconventionally) to express own meaning
• Build a repertoire of some conventionally spelled words
• Show awareness of distinction between “kid writing” and conventional orthography
• Write own name (first and last) and the first names of some friends and classmates
• Write most letters and some words when they are dictated