You will be amazed with what your child will learn by the end year. But it is so much more than just focusing on letters and sounds throughout the year. In order to monitor your child’s progress, he or she will also be required to take various assessments throughout the school year. The skills your child will learn are based on National and State Standards.

Language Arts

Reading

Each district will have expectations that your child will read at a specific level at various points in the year. The levels may vary depending on the reading assessments administered by the school district. For example, in my school district we administered the DRA2 (Developmental Reading Assessment). This test is used to determine a student’s independent and instructional reading level. In January, students are expected to be reading at an Independent Reading Level 2. By May, students are expected to be reading at an Independent Reading Level 4. For samples on what each leveled book contains, please see your child’s teacher.

Skills your child will learn in Reading:

  • Understand features of print: left to right, top to bottom
  • Identify parts of a book
  • Writer upper/lowercase letters using correct letter sounds
  • Rhyme identification and production
  • Break words into syllables
  • Isolate and substitute beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words
  • Long and short vowel sounds
  • Read sight words (high frequency words)
  • Read emergent level text for purpose and understanding
  • Answer questions about and retell stories
  • ID character, setting, problem, solutions, and major events in a story
  • ID author and illustrator roles
  • Make connections and give opinions on favorite/most important part of a story

Writing

In the beginning stages of writing, students will draw, scribble, and use inventive spelling. Students will use knowledge of letter sound relationships to write words. They will progress to labeling pictures, to stringing words together to form a sentence. Students will write multiple sentences by the end of the school year.

Skills your child will learn in writing:

  • Spell simple words phonetically
  • Write a variety of stories ranging from research papers to personal narratives
  • Write multiple sentences with proper spacing, capitalization, punctuation and meaningful content

Math

The skills your child will learn in Math:

  • Count to 100 and count on from a given number. (Ex. start at 35, count to 100)
  • Write numbers 0 – 20
  • Represent a number of objects with a written number and count to answer how many
  • Identify if a group of objects are greater than, less than, or equal to another group
  • Addition and subtraction word problems within 10
  • Take apart numbers to 10 inmate than one way
  • Find the number to make 10 when given a number
  • Add and subtract fluently within 5
  • Understand the concept of tens and ones
  • Describe/compare/contrast measurable features of objects
  • Put objects into categories and sort those categories by count
  • Use terms of position: below, beside, etc
  • ID 2 and 3 dimensional shapes
  • Use language to describe shapes similarities and differences (corners, vertices, sides, etc)

Assessments

Types of assessments administered will vary district to district, state to state. Besides various reading assessments your child will take, your child may also take standardized assessments on the computer. Yes, in Kindergarten! Some examples of these assessments include MAP (Measures of Academic Progress Test) or AIMSWeb Plus. These tests measure student performance and your child’s teacher will use the results of these assessments to plan individualized lessons for your child.

Please take the results of these tests at the Kindergarten level with a grain of salt. Many students, especially at the beginning of the year, do not understand how to use a mouse, which can affect the results of the test. Also, at ages 4 and 5, many students do not take these tests seriously, nor should they. The results are just a small snapshot of your child’s progress in school. Please refer to your child’s teacher and report card to get an overall view of your child’s progress in school.