Reading: Kindergarten

Learn how your child develops reading skills in Kindergarten and how you can help at home.

By Shira Ackerman, MA
Jan 25, 2013
Reading: Kindergarten

Jan 25, 2013

In kindergarten, children begin to grow as independent readers and become more familiar and comfortable with reading. Reading is intertwined into the daily life of your kindergartner. A kindergarten classroom is full of words and labeled objects. Students read and talk about books, as well as read the day’s schedules, class letters, songs, and poems throughout the day.

In order to build reading skills, your kindergartner:

  • Learns all of the letters of the alphabet (upper case and lower case) and their sounds.
  • Begins to “read” books himself, mainly by memorization.
  • Recognizes several basic sight words such as I, my, you, is, and are.
  • Reads and listens to stories and then talks about the stories, including their plots, characters, and events.
  • Follows words from left to right, top to bottom, and page by page.
  • Recognizes and can produce rhyming words.
  • Adds or substitutes individual sounds in simple, one-syllable words to make new words, such as replacing the “C” in “Cat” with an “R” to create the word “Rat.”

Reading Activities

  • Read and Repeat: Have your child “read” her favorite book to you, using her memory, associations, and clues from the pictures.
  • Alphabet Books: Use drawings or pictures from magazines to create an alphabet book with a letter and an object that begins with that letter on each page.
  • Fill in the Blank: When you read a favorite picture book to your child and come across a short word that rhymes or is familiar to your child because he knows the book very well, stop and let him say the word. Point to the word as he says it and spell it out.
  • Act it Out: Act out parts of or the whole story of your child’s favorite and well-known books.