What English skills are taught in elementary school?
Elementary reading and language arts skills range from your real basic prereading, preliteracy skills, knowing the alphabets, knowing the sounds, basic phonicsthrough reading and they'll be reading good size chapter books by the time they finish the fifth grade. And writing, first graders should be able to write a sentence, second graders should be able to write a paragraph, and by the time they finish fifth or sixth grade they should be able to write a pretty coherent five paragraph essay. Three are three main aspects of reading that schools focus on and that kids and teachers should focus on. You've got your fluency, which is just the ability to put words together and read them out. You've got vocabulary, which is knowing what the words mean, and then you've got comprehension, which is the ability to know what is going on in the book and that ranges from picking out kind of small details, what was that guy's name, what happened to him to making bigger picture comprehension assessments which is, you know, what do you think is going to happen next or why do you think he did that or why are those dogs and cats mean to one another, that sort of thing. Little kids read really basic, usually phonics, readers, what we used to call primers or Basil readers, all the kind of short vowels; they're are all there together. And then they progress into harder books, really simple chapter books, ones that are basically picture books, but they are broken down into the small sort of size book and they're broken down into chapters, and then they move on to the harder chapter books which usually look more like adult books. This is a particularly fat one but they're got smaller print, they've got more chapters, they've got more complex stories, and for a lot of kids graduating into chapter books is a really big deal.
