Teaching the Alphabetic Principle:
Alphabetic Principle benchmarks

Kindergarten

Students should be able to demonstrate the following skills at the end of Kindergarten:

Letter-Sound Correspondence Knowledge

• Identifies the letter when someone produces the corresponding sound.
• Says the most common sound associated with individual letters.

Decoding

• Blends the sounds of individual letters to read one-syllable, short-vowel, decodable words (e.g., sun; map).

Sight-Word Reading

• Recognizes some words by sight including a few common, high-frequency words (e.g., a, the, I, my, you, of, is, are).

This video clip shows an example of a student with established letter-sound correspondence skills. The student recognizes letter sounds and is able to blend sounds together to form nonsense words. (Click button to play video.)