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We go to a fairly diverse public school and there is a huge range of reading abilities. My daughter is probably somewhere in the middle - she has lots of sight words and has already learned a lot to read simple things like bob books. But she definitely didn’t come in reading, though a few kids did. There was a post with a big list of kinder readiness a while ago but for us it was more things like comfort with letters, can write their name, etc. Reasonable stuff. I’ve heard from other moms most kids will be reading simple stuff by January.

@yoursilverlining: this sounds very similar to our school! I can appreciate relaxed

@bhbee: Yeah me too! It’s so interesting how varied schools are. A friend of mine’s son is in public school about half hour from us and they send home homework every day and I was like what the what?! as we haven’t gotten any.

@pinkcupcake: we don’t have homework for K either.. My DD is not reading independently. One wrinkle for us is that she is in Spanish immersion so half her day is English and half is Spanish.

For Spanish they are working on all the letter sounds (because the sounds are always the same—so logical compared to English) and she has several words she can recognize.

For English they have a list of 20 sight words they should know by the end of the year (and I think 100 by end of grade 1) and she is recognizing a lot. I am seeing a lot of progress in terms of her interest level, guessing the word from the first letter, and general discussion of things like which friends have an “A that says ‘uh’ in their names. So that feels like progress?

DS can read but usually messes up words he hasn't seen yet. He just goes "blablabla" when he gets to the really tough ones. The kids are "expected" to read something short four times a week, but the teacher doesn't care if they're reading or being read to.

@MamaCate: we're working on a second language too! Only we're doing it outside of school so it's much harder to find motivation I think I'll have to resort to something like scavenger hunts with little notes he has to read. At least the other classwork in K is super easy, so we can do a little extra at home.

@MamaCate: it's very hit and miss! His pre-K group was bilingual and he was making great progress, but two months in public school, and he's claiming he "can't" read in our second language. I guess I'll keep trying to teach him for another couple of months, and if he really isn't interested I'll just let it go...

Our school district expectations are independent D by the end of the year. Most get to at least an independent C and an instructional D.

My own child (a young kinder), is currently on an independent B—so on track for an independent D by EOY. If he doesn’t get there, I’m okay with it! Reading is a tricky thing. As long as they have strong reading behaviors, that’s very important (can match 1:1, masters return sweep, has problem solving strategies when at a point of struggle). I

DS is in K. We have been so blessed as he's been reading for a while now. He can read independently and school has been giving him chapter books to take home. The thing we are working on now is I don't think he fully understands /comprehends what he is reading. He's also not good at telling stories and he couldn't independently tell you what is the beginning, middle and the end of the book he just read.

My son is in K and can read some sight words but not independent reading at all. I am actually surprised at the amount of homework he has. His teacher sends home monthly activities and he has to choose at least 3 activities per week to do (for example last night it was holding ten pennies in one hand and 10 pieces of rice in the other and which weighs more) and then he has a packet of homework she sends in the beginning of the week and he can do it nightly or hand it in at the end of the week. The homework reinforces the lessons they do at school so practicing handwriting, recognizing sight words, cutting, pasting, coloring, rhyming activities.

On the subject of reading levels: I've been looking up nearly all of the books my son reads across the various commonly-used scales (DRA, Lexile, Guided Reading Level, etc) and my conclusion is that they're not worth getting hung up on as long as the child is making steady progress. I feel like they're fairly imperfect measurements and the difference between for example, an "M" and a "P" book or an "18" and a "24" book is nothing to get worked up about. If you're looking for a very rough measure of approximately where things stand, they're fine, but if you're looking for granular detail or an exact ranking, they don't seem to be of much use.

Fortunately, it's easy to tell if progress is happening even without the labels from the scales--the books the child can read with minimal mistakes and good comprehension get increasingly more sophisticated in terms of language and content.

@yellowbird: Generally, all books are leveled by lexile (text complexity) or level, which is the general level of text. Sometimes you'll hear this referred to as "DRA level," or "reading level." PreA is what is essentially a non-reader, and then reading levels go all the way up to level Z.

In our school district, students in kinder are supposed to be an independent D by EOY, 1st a J by EOY, 2nd an M, etc. Of course we want students to enjoy reading for pleasure, but at some point children have to be exposed to challenging texts and text of increasing difficulty (reading passages on state exams are usually written at a much higher level than grade level expectations).

An independent level is when a book is read totally independently with no help, and few errors are made in the text. It's also done on what is called a cold read, where the text has never been seen by the child before, so they are reading it for the first time. An instructional level is where the teacher can help and more errors can be made in the text.

A HUGE part of determining a level can't be where a child is just word calling (reading the words but can't tell you what they just read). I could write a super long post on comprehension, but that's for another time. Reading for meaning is also an essential part of good reading behaviors.

Sorry if I digressed some, but there is so much to learning and teaching reading I could go on and on!

My son was in K last year. There was zero reading expectation at the beginning of the year, although there was an expectation that they knew all the letters. My son is educated in the French system, so they don’t do sight words at all, they do phonics since the vast majority of sounds follow the rules. Last year was an enormous building process starting from A. He had short reading homework nearly every day, each day building on the previous day. By mid year he could sound out any word whose phoneme he had studied. By the end of the year, reading homework was 3-4 paragraphs with words of varying complexity. I was very impressed by the whole process since he basically started at zero.

Now, 2 months into 1st grade they are still working on some of the more complex phonemes. When he reads aloud it’s much more fluent than before, but it’s still slow and plodding at times when there are bigger words that he’s unfamiliar with.

My son is in kindergarten at a catholic school. He has math homework two nights a week which consist of worksheets. He gets 4 sight words on Monday which we are supposed to review every day. By this point, he has 50 total and knows about 40 really well. He doesn't fight the homework but sight words are a battle! Once a week, he has reader he needs to read and go over. He can recognize some of his sight words in these books. At our parent/teacher conference, we were told that each student progresses differently. At year end, some may read but not all. And complete reading is not expected by the end of Kindergarten.