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Kindergarten and First Grade Speaking and Listening Standards

*many of these standards and elements are not expected to be mastered until the end of first grade* 

 Click here for an introduction to America's Choice.

Standard 1: Habits

Standard 2: Kinds of Talk and Resulting Genres

 Standard 3: Language Use and Conventions

 Standard 1: Habits

    We expect kindergarten and first grade students to:

    • Talk about their ideas, experiences and feelings;
    • Listen to others, signaling comprehension by clarifying, agreeing, empathizing or commenting as appropriate;
    • Playfully manipulate language (for example, deliberate rhyming, intentional or unconscious use of metaphor, name games like “Sue, Sue, bo-boo. Banana Fanna fo-foo”);
    • Listen to and engage in sentence play (for example manipulate and combine sentence structures at the syntactic level
    • Negotiate how to work and play (for example, “Can I have the shovel? You can use the scoop”)
    • Ask or answer focused questions for the purpose of learning something; and
    • Share and talk about what they’re reading or learning (for example, reactions or focused discussions after read-alouds or book talks).
    • Share and talk about their writing daily (for example, in response groups during Writer’s Workshop); and
    • Give and receive feedback by asking questions or making comments about:
      • Truth: “Is that true, what you wrote, about driving a hundred miles an hour?” 
        Clarity: “I don’t get why you broke the bat. You didn’t tell why.” 
        Extent: “Okay, but you already told me about Snow White’s evil stepmother once. What happened next?” 
        Relevance: “What’s that got to do with a circus clown?” 

  • Talking to One’s Self

    We expect kindergarten and first grade students to:

    • Make spontaneous corrections to their own behavior, actions, or language (for example, “John say, I mean said, ‘I want a double scoop.’”); and
    • Talk to themselves out loud to make plans, guide behavior or monitor thinking (for example, “No, no. Start over, not round enough for a circle.”); and
    • Mimic the language or adults

    While they are reading we expect students to:

    By the end of first grade we expect children to:

    • Initiate conversations by bringing up topics that are likely to interest others (for example, a child approaches a girl playing Barbies: “Do you have Skipper? I do.”);
    • Initiate and sustain a conversation with comments or questions through at least six or seven exchanges (for example, ask questions that extend the topic:
    • Child 1: “Yesterday was my birthday.”
      Child 2: “What did you get as a present?”
      Child 1: “A bike.”)

    • Occasionally ask for or provide clarification (for example, Child 2: “What color bike?”);
    • Solicit others’ contributions (for example, Child 1: “A blue bike. And I got a helmet. Do you wear one?”); and
    • Mark new topics explicitly (for example, Child 2: “Do I wear a helmet when I ride my bike? Yes, so I don’t hurt my head if I fall.” Or, in a new conversation simply, “Guess what happened on the slide?”).
       
  • Discussing Books

    By the end of first grade, we also expect children to:

    • Compare two works by the same author;
    • Talk about several books on the same theme (for example, “This book is like the last one. The kids are fighting, and the grown-ups want them to get along.”);
    • Refer explicitly to parts of the text when presenting or defending a claim (for example, “No, he doesn’t like his brother. He didn’t want to take him, but his mom made him.”);
    • Politely disagree when appropriate (for example, “Yes, he does, because they had fun after all.”);
    • Ask each other questions that seek elaboration and justification (for example, “When did you think they were having fun? He was crying on the roller-coaster.”);
    • Attempt to explain why their interpretation of a book is valid (for example, “He does like him. At the end he says, ‘You’re okay for a mutt,’ but he’s just kind of teasing… like nice.”)
    • Extend the story;
    • Make predictions and explain their reasoning (for example, “He’s going to miss it [the bus]. He’s late again because… he’s always late.”);
    • Talk about the motives of characters (for example, “She is so angry about him losing her doll.”);
    • Describe the causes and effects of specific events (for example, “Her snake got lost. It disappeared because she forgot to shut the cage.”);
    • Retell or summarize the story (for example, “It’s a book about animals and all the different places they live.”); and
    • Describe in their own words new information they gained from the text (for example, “Some animals sleep during the day, like owls.”).

Standard 2: Kinds of Talk and Resulting Genres

    By the end of first grade, we expect children to:

    • Independently give a detailed narrative account of an experience in which the actual sequence of numerous events in clear.
    • Solicit and/or engage the listener’s attention directly or indirectly before going into the full account (for example, a fire-year-old starts, “Know what?”, a six-year-old says, “I broke my arm” before beginning the account of the accident.);
    • Orient the listener to the setting (people, objects, and events) using concrete details, transition words, and time words (for example, “Last night my mom and me saw a fire!”);
    • Describe information and evaluate or reflect on it (for example, “I reached up there and my thumb got caught in the mousetrap. It really scared me, and I jumped off the stool.”);
    • Develop characters by portraying themselves as one or by talking about another character’s goals and motivations (for example, “She wanted to go home, so she said, ‘I’m sick.’”);
    • Include quotations (for example, “Dad said, ‘That’s a whopper!”);
    • Build the sequence of events to a climax and comment on how things were resolved; or
    • Mark the end of the story directly or with a coda to bring the impact of the past experience up to the present time (for example, "Do you want to sign my cast? I have to have it on for six weeks.").
       
  • Explaining and Seeking Information.

    By the end of first grade, we expect children to:

    • Seek or provide information by observing; going to the library; or asking teachers, parents or peers;
    • Listen to information and exhibit comprehension;
    • Request or provide explanations of their own and others’ intentions and thinking, especially when asked (for example, Q: “Why is your sweater on the table?” A: “I thought I was going back out.”);
    • Describe things by focusing on multiple characteristics (for example, “My friend John is five. He loves his cowboy hat; every day he wears it.”);
    • Describe things in more evaluative terms, giving reasons for evaluations (for example, “I don’t like the mailman. He yells at my dog.”); and
    • Share information (without extraneous details) that is organized on a topic and supported by a visual aid (for example, children bring in a picture- or draw one- of their pet- or one they’d like to have- and explain why it is a good pet for the family.)

    By the end of first grade, we expect children to:

    • Listen to, comprehend and carry out directions with five or six simple steps;
    • Give directions that include several sequenced steps, explaining and elaborating when necessary (for example, explaining how to buy mild in the cafeteria or feed the class turtle);
    • Ask for clarification to carry out more complicated directions, persisting if necessary (for example, “How do I get the water bowl out? It’s stuck in the cage.”); and
    • Engage in extended conversations (five or six exchanges) about a problem, with both sides presenting and listening to arguments and solutions.

    By the end of first grade, we expect children to:

    • Give simple evaluative expressions about a performance and explain their reasoning (for example, “I like it because horses are my favorite animal.”);
    • Critique  performance (especially their own) based on agreed-upon criteria;
    • Ask questions about things that they don’t understand;
    • Draw from a rehearsed repertoire to give a brief performance (for example, “The Hokey Pokey”);
    • Rehearse and memorize short poems or lines of a play (for example, memorize and present short speeches in the context of a class play or presentation prepared for parents or another class); and
    • Give a brief author performance or presentation of work.

 Standard 3: Language Use and Conventions

    By the end of first grade, we expect children to:

    • Know and be able to describe rules for school interactions (for example, using “inside” voices, not pushing in line, taking turns, raising hand to speak)
    • Learn rules for polite interactions (for example, saying “excuse me” when interrupting or “I’m sorry” when accidentally bumping someone);
    • Hold self and others accountable to the rules by using verbal reminders to self and others (for example, “Only one person on the slide at a time”); and
    • Speak one at a time, look at and listen to the speaker, yield and/or signal for a chance to speak, and adjust volume to the setting.
       

    By the end of first grade, we expect children to:

  • Word Play, Phonemic Awareness and Grammatical Awareness
    • Produce rhyming words and recognize pairs of rhyming words;
    • Isolate initial consonants in single-syllable words (for example, saying “/t/” when the teacher asks, “What is the first sound in top?”);
    • Segment the onset and the rime in single-syllable words (for example, saying the onset “/c/” and then the rime “/at/,” if the teacher says, “Cat”);
    • Segment the individual sounds in single-syllable words by saying “/c/-/a/-/t/” if the teacher says, “Cat”);
    • Blend onsets and rimes to form words (for example, saying “cat” when the teacher says, “/c/-/at/”);
    • Blend separately spoken phonemes to make a meaningful word (for example, saying “mom” when the teacher says, “mmm-ahhhh-mmm”);
    • Play with alliteration, tongue twisters and onomatopoeia (for example, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”);
    • Begin to use double meaning or multiple meanings of words for riddles and jokes;
    • Vary sentence openers and use a wide range of syntactic patterns; and
    • Examine and discuss the structure of words.
       
  • Vocabulary and Word Choice

    By the end of first grade, we expect children to:

    • Build word maps that show the relationship between words, placing newly acquired words in categories that are relevant (for example, when studying special interests like dinosaurs, understanding that a Tyrannosaurus eats meat and a Brontosaurus eats plants, but that both are dinosaurs);
    • Begin to define words they know using simple superordinates (for example, “A violin in an instrument.”);
    • Show flexibility within the domain, i.e., alter word choice based on audience (for example, when talking to a toddler, “Try the horn,” but when talking to an adult, “Want to try my trumpet?”);
    • Learn new words from reading, being read to daily and classroom study experiences;
    • Study word families;
    • Know more than one way to describe a particular referent or verb (for example, “Mrs. Benton” is called “teacher” by children in her class and “mom” by her daughter in the third grade);
    • Recognize multiple meanings of words (for example, go to school, school of fish, my aunt home-schools her kids);
    • Understand that clusters of words refer to the same events or phenomena but from different perspectives (for example, if someone is buying, another person must be selling; if someone lost the game, another person won); and
    • Increase vocabulary of verbs adjectives and adverbs to gain fluency and exercise options in word choice.

 Reference

Speaking and Listening for preschool through third grade by New Standards Speaking and Listening Committee 

Austell Primary is an America's Choice School

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This site was last updated 08/17/05