Alphabetic Principle
Student Benchmarks
Kindergarten
Students Should Demonstrate These 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).
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. |
First Grade
Students Should Demonstrate These Skills at the End of First Grade:
- 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).
- 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).
- Sight-Word Reading
- Increases knowledge of common sight words and reads them automatically (e.g., have, would, there, said).
Second Grade
Students Should Demonstrate These Skills at the End of Second Grade:
- Letter-Sound Knowledge
- Produces the sounds that correspond to frequently used diphthongs ou, oy, and digraphs sh, th, ea.
- 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.
- Sight-Word Reading
- Increases the number of sight words that are read accurately and quickly.