NOTE: This is a compilation of skills and facts a child should be able to complete and understand at the end of kindergarten. The list of skill sets here will be learned during the kindergarten year.

Language Arts

Art

• Learn how to use scissors to cut straight lines
• Learn how to paste paper objects onto other paper
• Play with different medius (crayons, water color, marker, colored pencil, clay, etc…)

Literature

• Begin study of stories: Children’s adventure stories, folktales, legends, fables, fantasies, realistic fiction, and myth
• Begin study of dramas: this includes stages dialogue and brief familiar scenes
• Begin study of poetry: nursery rhymes, and lots of poetry including limerick and free verse
• Begin study of Nonfiction: biographies, autobiographies, history stories, social studies, science and the arts. This also includes technical texts including directions, forms, information displayed in graphs, charts, and maps.

Music

• Use music to help children learn reading and math concepts
• Clap to a beat

Reading

• Know the alphabet, upper case and lower case letters and the letter sounds
• Know basic sight words (the, and, it, is, was, of, you, she, he, my, do, does) without having to sound out
• Ask and answer questions about a story
• Retell main details of a story and identify the main topic
• Identify parts of a book: front cover, back cover and title page
• Know the difference between an author and an illustrator
• Identify basic similarities and differences between two texts
• Understand the organization of print: read from left to right, spaces separate words
• Understand and say rhyming words
• Understand syllables: counting, pronouncing, blending and segmenting
• Blend and segment onsets and rimes of single syllable words
• Isolate and pronounce the three sounds in three letter, one syllable words: CVC words like cat, dip, bin
• Add or substitute letters in CVC words: turn cat into hat
• Know the five major vowels and identify their soft and hard sounds
• Know that all other letters that are not vowels are called consonants
• Read emergent readers with clarity and understanding

Spelling

• Phonetically spell simple words, using what they’ve learned about sound-letter relationships
• Spell first and last name correctly
• Spell basic sight words correctly (the, and, to, of, for, but, so, etc…)

Vocabulary

• Learn new vocabulary words to express their ideas, thoughts, and feelings
• Understand a few basic homophones (duck is a noun and a verb)
• Use the most frequently occurring inflections and affixes to determine meaning of new word (pre-, -less, -ful, etc…)
• With guidance, sort common objects into categories (food, shapes, colors, etc…) to gain a sense of the concept that category represents
• Understand frequently occurring verbs and adjectives by exploring their opposites (antonyms)
• Identify real-life connection between words and their use (Things in my backyard that are brown)
• Distinguish shades of meaning of verbs that describe the same action (walk, march, strut, etc…)
• Begin to use words and phrases acquired through reading and conversation

Writing & Grammar

• Write simple words with ease
• Copy work
• Clearly print their first and last name
• Clearly print both uppercase and lowercase letters
• Clearly print ending punctuations
• Know what a noun is (person, place, thing or idea) and be able to identify one in a picture
• Recognize and name different ending punctuations (!, ?, .)
• Write a complete sentence (start with a capital letter, end with a punctuation)
• Able to write and recognize uppercase and lowercase letters
• Use a combination of writing, drawing, and dictating to express opinion (My favorite book is _____ because _____)
• Use a combination of writing, drawing, and dictating to narrate an event
• Copy work
• Form plural nouns by adding -s or -es to nouns (dog to dogs)
• Understand and use question words (who, what, where, why, why, how)
• Write the most frequently occurring prepositions (to, on, in, out, on, off, for, by, with)
• Write a complete sentence (start with a capital letter, end with a punctuation)
• Recognize and name different ending punctuations (!, ?, .)

Mathematics

Categorize Objects

• Count to tell the number of objects: Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities
• When counting objects, say the number names in order, assigning a number to each object, and understand that the last number said is total number of objects
• Can identify an object when asked about it’s ordinal number place: Point to the third object, point to the seventh object.
• Classify objects and count the number of objects in categories
• Can sort categories of objects by count
• Can tell ‘how many’ objects are arranged in a line, a rectangular array, a circle, (up to 20) or scattered (up to 10)

Money

• Can identify and understands the value of each coin: penny, nickel, dime, quarter

Number Sense & Comparisons

• Can count to 100 by 1’s, 2’s and 10’s
• Count forward beginning at a given number, without starting at 1
• Can recognize and identify numbers written in number form up to 100: 38, 52, 16
• Knows the difference between an odd and even number
• Write numbers 0-20
• Compare two numbers between 1 and 10
• Compare numbers (greater than, less than, or equal to)

Operations: Addition & Subtraction

• Basic understanding of addition and subtraction: addition is adding or putting together, subtraction is taking away from or taking apart
• Fluently add and subtract within 5 (mentally, without help)
• Complete addition and subtraction problems up to 10: 8 + 1 = 9, 5 – 2 = 3, etc..
• Represent addition and subtraction with objects, fingers, mental images, drawings, claps, or equations
• Solve addition and subtraction word problems, and add and subtract within 10: “Jimmy had 5 rocks in his collection, then he found 3 more. How many rocks does Jimmy have now?”
• Decompose numbers less than 10 into pairs in more than one way (2 + 8 = 10, 5 + 5 = 10, etc…)
• For any number from 1-9, find the number that makes 10 when added to the given number (May use objects or drawings and record answer with an equation)

Place Value

• Understands place value up to the tens place
• Work with number 11-19 to gain foundations for place value

Shapes

• Can identify, draw, and describe 2D shapes, and can name them correctly regardless of their size
• Describe objects in the environment using names of shapes, and describe the relative positions of these objects using terms such as (above, below, beside, in front of, behind, and next to)
• Model shapes by building shapes from components (sticks, clay) and drawing shapes
• Compose simple shapes to form larger shapes: tangrams

Time

• Can read analog clocks at the hour: 4:00, 7:00, 12:00

Other Suggested Subjects

Geography & Social Studies

• Know and name the days of the week
• Know and name the months of the year in order
• Celebrate different holidays

History

• Read historical stories and poems
• Celebrate historical holidays
• Eat historical food
• Sing historical songs
• Recognize different historical figures from their pictures

Science

• Study different weather
• Learn cause and effect

Social Development & Behavior

• Able to understand and follow rules of conversation like taking turns to talk and listening to others
• Able to ask questions if something is not understood
• Can ask questions about text read aloud to confirm understanding
• Describe familiar people, places, things, ideas and events in detail
• Speak audibly and express thoughts, feelings, and ideas in a clear way
• Read more about development in kindergarten

Additional Resources & Sources:

Check out government standards for your state

TGTB has LA placement and a math placement test. While it does go along with their curriculum, it also can help you identify where your child needs more work. You can also learn more about TGTB.

Sources: Scholastic, Math Genie, Great Schools