Kindergarten through 3rd Grade - Reading, Writing, and Communicating Guidelines

1. Oral Expression and Listening
2. Reading for All Purposes
3. Writing and Composition
4. Research Inquiry and Design. 

• The first standard in the Reading, Writing, and Communicating content area focuses on children’s growing ability to communicate through talking and understanding the spoken language around them. Toddlers and preschoolers develop these skills very fast and then keep increasing their ability to understand and use spoken language, as described within the Language Development domain for ages 3–5 years. 
• As they enter kindergarten, children continue to build their list of spoken words and are able to use new words when expressing their ideas, having conversations, and following directions. 
• In 1st grade, children may also say full sentences out loud, ask questions when they are confused, and include details when describing something. 
• In 2nd grade, children also connect their ideas to comments by others, and by 3rd grade children can prepare for a conversation by studying a topic or reading material. 
• Children in kindergarten through 3rd grade are also understanding more about language as they are more and more able to hear and tell the difference between sounds in words – a skill that is important to early reading.

• The second standard describes children’s ability to read a number of types of materials, which is also the primary focus of the Literacy Knowledge and Skills domain in the Guidelines for children ages 3–5 years.
• Preschool and kindergarten children are learning the most basic processes of reading, including print, letter knowledge, and phonics. 
• Children in 1st through 3rd grade continue to increase their understanding of reading basics, and they also start to read on their own more quickly and easily. They are able to look at words and figure out the meaning of unknown words and increase their knowledge of words. 
• At the same time that children are learning to read, they start to appreciate and understand books and can think about the meaning of the text. The Book Appreciation and Knowledge subdomain in the Guidelines for children ages 3–5 years describe how preschool children start becoming interested in books and are able to look, listen, and ask questions about books. 
• In kindergarten through 3rd grade, the Reading for All Purposes standard describes how children continue to appreciate books by reading different types of texts. Children in kindergarten through 3rd grade understand more difficult books and are able to think about different parts of the stories

• The third standard relates to writing for a variety of purposes. Understanding skills that are described in the Guidelines for children ages 3–5 years in “Literacy Knowledge and Skills: Writing” are necessary first steps to be successful. As described in that section, preschool children are learning how writing shares meaning and creating messages using dictation, scribbles, shapes, pictures, and letters. 
• Children’s writing becomes stronger in kindergarten as students begin to follow more rules, such as printing upper- and lower-case letters and spacing between words. Kindergarten children use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to express an opinion, explain information, and tell stories. 
• In 1st through 3rd grade, children learn to use the writing process and their writing becomes more organized. In 1st grade, children begin to write closing statements at the end of a piece, in 2nd grade they use linking words, and in 3rd grade, they group related ideas in an organizational structure

• The final standard focuses on children’s ability to gather information, apply reasoning and logic, and provide an overview of information. The basis for these skills is found in the Guidelines for ages 3–5 years in the Literacy Knowledge Skills: Comprehension and Text Structure subdomain and in the Logic and Reasoning: Reasoning and Problem-Solving subdomain. 
  • These subdomains describe how preschoolers develop the ability to retell information from books and apply it, such as using past knowledge to build new knowledge and seeking multiple solutions to a question or task. Older children in kindergarten through 3rd grade continue to build these skills. 
• Kindergarteners learn to ask appropriate questions and collect information to answer their questions. 
• As children move from 1st through 3rd grade, they build on these skills by increasing the types of resources they use to answer increasingly difficult questions. 
• By 3rd grade, children are able to look at information and notice that different sources may have different points of view.