Kindergarten to 1st Grade

By the end of kindergarten, most students have mastered letter and sound relationships, which is referred to as "breaking the alphabetic code." A child who struggles with the alphabetic principle will struggle with reading.

There are early danger signs: listen to the first grader read. As you listen, see if he/she can link letters to sounds, match initial letters in a word to the right sound, and recognize common word families such as -ate, -at, and -ite.

In addition, the following characteristics are often present:

• History of talking later than most children, noted by pediatrician
• History of poor auditory memory for nursery rhymes and chants
• Difficulty with learning letter names and their corresponding sounds
• Difficulty with learning numbers, days of the week, colors, shapes, and how to spell and write his or her name
• Fails to understand that words come apart; for example, that snowman can be pulled apart into snow and man; and that the word man can be broken down further and sounded out as /m/ /a/ /n/
• Can learn individual sounds /c/, /a/, and /t/ but consistently struggles to blend sounds into a word
• Reading errors that show no connection to the sounds of the letters (i.e. big for goat)
• Inability to sound out common one-syllable words such as mat, hop, and car
• Complaints about how hard reading is