Language Accomplishments for Children

At age 6, most first-graders can:

Read and retell familiar stories.

Use a variety of ways to help with reading a story such as rereading, predicting what will happen, asking questions, or using visual cues or pictures.

Decide on their own to use reading and writing for different purposes;

Read some things aloud with ease.

Identify new words by using letter-sound matches, parts of words and their understanding of the rest of a story or printed item.

Identify an increasing number of words by sight.

Sound out and represent major sounds in a word when trying to spell.

Write about topics that mean a lot to them.

Try to use some punctuation marks and capitalization.

By Barbara J. Feldman

Barbara J. Feldman is a syndicated columnist and the publisher of Surf Net Parents, Surfnetkids.com and 51+ other family-friendly sites. She has been creating websites since 1996, and loves teaching others how to solve WordPress problems.