Reading Skills by Grade (part 1 mini-guide)
Reading Skills by Grade (part 1 mini-guide)
Please be mindful that this guide pulls out the big skills and goals for reading successfully. The sources below have more in-depth research and guide on literacy skills by specific grade level.
As we are talking about reading comprehension, it would be helpful to break down what skills students/children should learn and when they should be mastered.
Birth- Pre-K Skills (ages birth-4/5):
Pre-literacy skills are learned before kindergarten and are needed for children to be successful readers. Our children will develop pre-literacy skills as they enter daycare and preschool.
Pre-literacy Skills include:
- Starting to recognize letters in the alphabet
- Children should develop an understanding of how to turn a page and how to hold books properly.
- Turning-taking during discussions.
- Building background knowledge and experience.
- Identify essential high-frequency words by using a picture and the first letter.
How does this look?
- At this age, children should be exposed to a diverse selection of topics and themes. (i.e., sports, arts, history, and science)
- Regular verbal discussions about what was just read.
- Texts should bring in multiple perspectives.
- Explicit teaching of letter and word sounds (phonics).
- Children should be exposed to different types of texts/passages.
- i.e., songs, charts, or even newspapers
- starts to recognize basic signs like "STOP"
PS. Unless your child was diagnosed with a learning disability or cognitive disability, all children can pick on these skills. Research shows that by the time a child enters kindergarten, they could know more than 4,000 words.
Elementary Skills k-5/6 (ages 5-10/11):
These are skills that students will develop throughout elementary school. The skills learned in elementary schools help our students use reading as a learning tool when they get to secondary school and beyond. Reading becomes very difficult in secondary school when students do not develop these skills.
Elementary reading skills include:
- Children will continue to build on their pre-literacy skills.
- decoding(finding patterns in words) and word knowledge
- Know when to turn a page.
- Recognize uppercase and lowercase letters.
- Identify high-frequency words (i.e., the, of, she, me, you)
- Increased discussions, arguments, and perspective-taking.
- Stamina for reading increases (how long a person can continuously read)
- Learn the different types of print and their uses.
- i.e., why and how we read a newspaper.
- Increase vocabulary knowledge
- Summarize texts/passages.
- Make basic inferences about what might happen.
- Reads high-frequency words with ease.
- Learning and memorizing roots, prefixes, and suffixes.
- This will help children learn new words without looking them up first. This is helpful once they take classes like chemistry or global history.
How does this look?
- Increased reading of diverse texts.
- Knows the difference between non-fiction, fiction, and poetry.
- Points out the main idea or key details in the story.
- As students reach 5th and 6th grade, less energy is spent on decoding, and more attention is given to understanding the text.
We test for reading readiness in 4th and 8th in the United States.
sources
- https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/standards-instruction/literacy-brief-4.pdf
- Video discussion on NYS Literacy Briefs
- https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/standards-instruction/literacy-brief-6.pdf
- https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/standards-instruction/literacy-brief-5.pdf
- https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-reading/language-and-speech/meaning-preliteracy.html
- https://www.doe.mass.edu/massliteracy/literacy-block/foundational-skills/for-all.html
- https://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/ela/standards/prek-5reading-found.pdf
- https://www.readingrockets.org/reading-101/how-children-learn-read/typical-reading-development