General Expectations for Reading and Writing by Grade Level

By the end of Kindergarten:

Reading Skills: Understands that a book reads from left to right, identifies rhyming words, compares and matches words based on their sounds, understands that letters are represented by individual sounds, identifies upper and lower case letters, and imitates reading a book by looking at the pictures and talking about the story
Writing Skills: Prints first and last name, draws a picture that tells a story and writes simply about the story, and writes some upper and lowercase letters

By the end of First Grade:

Reading Skills: Creates rhyming words, identifies all sounds in a simple word, matches spoken words to print, sounds out words when reading, and reads 100 common sight words
Writing Skills: Expresses ideas through simple writing, prints legibly, spells frequently used words correctly, and begins each sentence with a capital letter

By the end of Second Grade:

Reading Skills: Has fully mastered phonics/sound correspondence, uses phonics strategies when reading, recognizes many words by sight, re-reads and self-corrects, explains key elements of the story, and identifies and uses spelling patterns in words when reading
Writing Skills: Writes legibly, uses a variety of sentence types, organizes writing to have a beginning, middle and end, and progresses from spelling by sound to more accurate spelling

By the end of Third Grade:

Reading Skills: Demonstrates full knowledge of basic phonics patterns, uses clues from the story to help understand what is read, predicts and summarizes stories, compares and contrast stories, and re-reads and corrects errors as they read
Writing Skills: Plans, organizes and edits writing, includes good details in stories, writes in cursive, demonstrates other types of writing including letters, simple reports and summaries

By the end of Fourth Grade:

Reading Skills: Reads for specific purposes, follows written directions, takes short notes, links information learned to different subjects, learns meanings of new words through knowledge of word origins, synonyms, and multiple meanings, uses reference materials, and makes inferences and paraphrases content
Writing Skills: Writes effective narratives and explanations with several paragraphs, develops an organized plan for writing, and edits writing for grammar, punctuation and spelling

By the end of Fifth Grade:

Reading Skills: Learns meanings of new words through prefixes, suffixes and root words, reads a variety of literature, describes character development and plot, describes poetry, and uses reference materials to support opinions
Writing Skills: Writes for a variety of purposes, uses detailed vocabulary, varies sentence structure, revises writing for clarity, and edits final copies.