General Guidelines for Kindergarten

General Guidelines for Kindergarten

Keep in mind that children are individuals. God has created each one with different gifts, interests and abilities. The skills listed below are guidelines only.

Note: A portion of this list comes from Active Learning for Fives by Debbie Cryer.

Five Year Olds can:

Motor Skills:

• handle toileting by self, usually dry through the night
• prefer to use either left or right hand
• cut well with scissors 
• dress and undress well alone
• draw person with head, body, legs, arms, and other parts
• print name, but not too clearly
• write some, but not all, letters of the alphabet
• draw most easy shapes

Pre-reading Skills:

• answer the telephone and call correct person to the phone
• know colors and color names well
• understand place words (on top of, over, under)
• use time words (morning, night) to tell when things happen
• listen well to a story read to a large group of children
• make up rhyming words
• use long sentences, tying thoughts together
• tell a story from a picture book very well
• tell left shoes from right shoes
• make only a few mistakes in speaking
• confuse some similar words, such as ask and tell
• play easy table games with a friend and often follow rules
• begin to tell one letter from another
• name most uppercase but not most lowercase letters
• read a few words
• know how to read his/her own name
• recognize upper and lower case letters
• hear the beginning sounds of words, like “d” in dog
• read some high-frequency words (Dolch list, pdf document).
• read the first few levels of decodeable readers for kindergarten;
• retell in simple terms stories that have been read to him/her as well as make simple evaluations and interpretations of their content
• connect, with your help, what is read to him/her with real experiences 

General Guidelines for Math:

• understand more and fewer
• understand size (biggest, tallest, smallest, etc)
• understand patterns of numbers (missing numbers 1-10, counting by 5’s, 10’s)
• understand positions (top, bottom, left, right, center)
• say numbers from 1 to 20
• know shapes and do shape puzzles well
• write some numbers and tell their names
• count things quite well
• begin to understand money and how it is used
• know when something is cut in halfs, thirds, or quarters
• say some numbers above 20
• do very easy adding using 1, 2, 3, 4 (1+1, 2+3)
• begin to understand clocks and time
• begin to know what a ruler and thermometer are used for