Normal Language Skill Development

The following list of milestones is the result of current research in the field where studies continue to analyze how and when children learn and begin to present certain language skills. As you look over this list, keep in mind that children vary greatly in how and when they develop and learn these skills. These skills do not follow a concrete order.

At age 5, most kindergartners become able to:

• Sound as if they are reading when they pretend to read.

• Enjoy someone reading to them.

• Retell simple stories.

• Use descriptive language to explain or to ask questions.

• Recognize letters and make letter-sound matches.

• Show familiarity with rhyming and beginning sounds.

• Understand that reading print goes left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

• Match spoken words with written ones.

• Write letters of the alphabet and some words they use and hear often.

• Write stories with some readable parts.

At age 6, most first-graders can:

• Read and retell familiar stories.

• Use a variety of ways to help themselves read and comprehend a story (rereading, predicting, 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.

• Use some punctuation marks and capitalization.

“Remember that while babies aren’t born book lovers, they are born learners. The more you read to them, the more they learn.“ Kate Jack – Parent & Child Magazine Resources