Alphabetic Principle

Instruction

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Student Benchmarks


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Kindergarten


Students Should Demonstrate These Skills at the End of Kindergarten:

  1. Letter-Sound Correspondence Knowledge
    • Identifies the letter when someone produces the corresponding sound.
    • Says the most common sound associated with individual letters.
  2. Decoding
    • Blends the sounds of individual letters to read one-syllable, short-vowel, decodable words (e.g., sun; map).
  3. 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).
Video Clip Play Button First Sound Identification
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.

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First Grade


Students Should Demonstrate These Skills at the End of First Grade:

  1. Letter-Sound and Letter-Combination Knowledge
    • Produces the sounds associated with all individual letters fluently (e.g., 1 letter-sound per second).
    • Produces the sounds that correspond to frequently used letter combinations (e.g., sh, er, th).
  2. Decoding (Sounding Out Words)
    • Decodes (sounds out and blends) words with consonant blends (e.g., mask, slip, play).
    • Decodes (sounds out and blends) words with letter combinations accurately (diagraphs: fish, bath, chin; common letter combinations: book, farm, toy).
    • Uses knowledge of individual letter-sound correspondences and letter-combinations to read regular monosyllabic words fluently (e.g., mask, skip, play, fish, them, chin, at a rate of one word every 1 to 1.5 seconds).
    • Reads words with common words parts (e.g., ing, all, ike).
  3. Sight-Word Reading
    • Increases knowledge of common sight words and reads them automatically (e.g., have, would, there, said).

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Second Grade


Students Should Demonstrate These Skills at the End of Second Grade:

  1. Letter-Sound Knowledge
    • Produces the sounds that correspond to frequently used diphthongs ou, oy, and digraphs sh, th, ea.
  2. Decoding and Word Recognition
    • Uses knowledge of advanced phonic elements (e.g., digraphs and diphthongs), special vowel spelling, and word endings to recognize words.
    • Reads compound words, contractions, possessives, and words with inflectional endings.
    • Uses word context (semantics: Does it make sense?) and order in the sentence (syntax: Does it sound right?) to confirm or correct decoding efforts.
    • Reads multisyllabic words (2-3 syllables) using syllabication and word structure (e.g., base/root word, prefixes, and suffixes) in word recognition.
  3. Sight-Word Reading
    • Increases the number of sight words that are read accurately and quickly.

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