…ask them if it is “Standards-based”. Sounds a bit intimidating, doesn’t it. “Standards-based” means that your child’s pre-kindergarten experience will build a foundation in both decoding (phonics) and comprehension that will guarantee success in any kindergarten classroom.

The “standards” are a group of grade-level expectations for students in grades K – 12. Most of the states have adopted the national standards or have state standards that are very close to the national.

I worked with a group of pre-K and K teachers in a Minnesota public school system yesterday. We laid out the steps that teach young three to six year- olds how to use evidence from the text to support their answers to basic who, what, when, where, why and how questions. The teachers structured a detailed plan that starts with very easy, direct, literal questions with answers easy to find in both the text and the illustrations. By the end of Kindergarten, these “experienced” students will identify evidence from the text and illustrations that supports the building of inferences to answer questions about the literature and informational text they are reading. It was very exciting to see these teachers eager to get started using the plan with students.

As I facilitated the development of the learning objectives, I thought, “The next time that I work with these teachers, I’ll show them the Practickle website. The standards-based comprehension activities are already build for them. Practickle’s First Reading is about making inferences from the information in the illustrations. The Second Reading is full of questions that rely on finding evidence in the text.

Give your child’s teacher a gift of a Practickle subscription. It truly is “standard-based”! Save the teacher time, and guarantee the quality of your child’s reading experiences.