Begins to develop awareness that sentences, and then words, come apart
Shows an interest in the sounds of language: repeats and plays with sounds, especially rhymes
Identifies ten alphabet letters, most likely from his or her own name
Breaks spoken words into syllables (such as today=to-day)
Begins to sound out words, sees that each letter has a different sound
Recognizes and names a growing number of letters
Compares whether two spoken words rhyme:
Do cat and hat rhyme? Do hop and mat rhyme?
Names a word that rhymes with a simple word like cat or make
Recognizes and names just about all upper- and lower-case letters
Continues to progress in breaking spoken words apart
Identifies which of three spoken words or pictures begins with the same first sound of a given word–given the word "car," the child can select the word with the same beginning sound in this grouping: dog, cat, mat
Can pronounce the beginning sound in a word
Names all the letters of the alphabet
Begins to decode simple words
Recognizes a growing number of common words by sight
(you, my, the)
Uses inventive spelling to write words
Writes his or her own name (first and last) and the names of family members and/or pets
Can say the word that remains if given sound is taken away from the beginning or end of a word—when asked to say "bat" without the "b," she says "at"
Blends the sounds in three-phoneme words—when asked, "what do the sounds m, aaaa, and n form?", answers man
Reads aloud with accuracy and comprehension any text that is meant for first grade
Links letters to sounds to decode unknown words
Recognizes by sight common irregularly spelled words, which do not follow the pattern of a word family, such as have, said, where, two
Begins to learn strategies for breaking multisyllabic words into syllables
Accurately reads some multisyllable real and nonsense words, such as Kalamazoo
Reads and comprehends fiction and nonfiction meant for second grade
Begins to read with fluency–reads accurately, smoothly, rapidly, and with inflection
Represents the complete sound of a word when spelling
Reads on his own voluntarily
Uses knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and roots to infer meaning of words
Reads longer fiction selections and chapter books
Summarizes the main points from readings
Correctly spells previously studied words
Uses a dictionary to learn the meaning of unknown words
