What reading skills do children demonstrate when they enter kindergarten?
Children who entered kindergarten for the first time in fall 1998 brought certain reading skills into their kindergarten classrooms. About two-thirds of the kindergartners already knew the letters of the alphabet. About one-third knew the letter-sound relationship at the beginning of words, and about one-in-five knew the letter-sound relationship at the end of words (e.g., “cat” begins with the letter “c”; “dog” ends with the letter “g”). A small percentage of children who entered kindergarten could already read single words or words within the context of a sentence (figure 1).
