Kindergarten English at Home: The Standards Let Them Draw It

Kindergarten English is 41 Common Core standards, and the writing ones explicitly allow your child to draw the answer and tell it to you. W.K.1, W.K.2 and W.K.3 all begin with the same phrase: use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing. Common Core says in the text of the standard that a picture plus what the child said is writing at this age. Parents who did not know that spend the year worrying about letter formation while the actual standard goes unmet.

The year runs about 80 to 110 hours at home, roughly 25 to 30 minutes a day across four days, and most of it is spoken.

The 41 standards, by strand

Nineteen of the 41 are comprehension, and at kindergarten essentially all of them can be met on a book you are reading aloud. A five year old’s ability to think about a story runs years ahead of their ability to decode one, and the standards are written to be satisfied that way. This is the most important planning fact in the year.

The three hard ones

RF.K.2, phonological awareness

Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables and sounds. Entirely oral. No letters involved, which is why families focused on getting a child reading skip past it.

The misconception: that this is the same thing as phonics, so teaching letter sounds covers it. Phonics maps sounds to letters. This is the prior skill of hearing that the sounds are there at all.

The wrong answer it produces: ask a child what the first sound in “sun” is and they say “ess”, the letter name, or they say “sun”. Ask them to clap the syllables in “butterfly” and they clap randomly. Ask them to blend /m/ /a/ /p/ and they cannot get to “map”. None of it needs a book, which makes it both easy to test and easy to forget.

The reteach: three minutes a day, out loud, no materials. Rhyming, then syllable clapping, then first sounds, then blending. It is the strongest single predictor of later reading, and it only has one more year after this: the standard disappears entirely after grade 1.

W.K.1 to W.K.3, writing that is allowed to be a drawing

All three text types exist in kindergarten. Opinion (W.K.1), informative (W.K.2) and narrative (W.K.3), each explicitly permitting drawing, dictating and writing in combination.

The misconception: that writing means forming letters, so a child who cannot write cannot do the writing standards.

The wrong answer it produces: the year gets spent on handwriting and letter formation, and the child never composes anything. Then in grade 1, when the drawing-and- dictating scaffold narrows, they have a year of handwriting practice and no experience of having an idea and getting it out.

The reteach: ask for a picture and a sentence about it, and write the sentence down for them in their words. That is a complete W.K.3. Do it two or three times a week. Let handwriting develop on its own track, at its own pace, because it is a fine motor skill rather than a literacy one.

RL.K.2 and RI.K.2, retelling with key details

With prompting and support, retell familiar stories including key details, and identify the main topic and retell key details of an informational text.

The misconception: that a child who enjoyed a story understood its structure.

The wrong answer it produces: asked to retell, the child names their favorite moment and stops. Or starts in the middle. Or gives you a list of characters. The events are all in there and the order is not, and order is what the standard is actually about.

The reteach: three fingers. What happened first, then, last. Hold up a finger for each. Use very familiar stories at first, because retelling a new story and remembering a new story are two different jobs and you only want to be teaching one of them.

How long this actually takes at home

About 80 to 110 hours, or 25 to 30 minutes a day over four days. Where it goes:

• Reading aloud and talking about it: about half. Nineteen standards, and this is how they get met.
• Foundational skills: about a third, in very short bursts. Three minutes of sound work, a few minutes of letter sounds, some finger-point reading.
• Composing and language fill the rest, mostly spoken.

What to cut when it runs long. W.K.6 (digital tools) compresses to nothing, and shared research (W.K.7) can be one enjoyable project. Never compress the oral sound work.

Readiness check

1. Can they sit for a picture book? Not the whole thing, and not still. But engaged for several pages, because nearly half the standards depend on read-alouds.
2. Do they hear rhyme? Cat and hat. If not, that is where the year starts, and it comes before letters.
3. Will they tell you about something that happened? Any narrative at all, even disorganized. That is the raw material for both retelling and composing.

A sequence for a flexible year

1. Read aloud daily, well above their level. Everything else is easier behind this.
2. Oral sound work, three minutes daily (RF.K.2). Rhyme, syllables, first sounds, blending, in that order across the year.
3. Print concepts through pointing (RF.K.1). Where does the page start, which way do we read, show me one word.
4. Letter sounds, not letter names first (RF.K.3). A child who knows /m/ can start decoding; a child who knows “em” cannot.
5. Retelling with three fingers (RL.K.2, RI.K.2), on very familiar stories.
6. Draw-and-dictate composing (W.K.3 narrative first, then W.K.2, then W.K.1), two or three times a week.
7. Emergent-reader texts (RF.K.4), once some letter sounds are secure. Note the standard says “with purpose and understanding”, not fluently: fluency does not appear until grade 1.
8. Characters, settings and how books work (RL.K.3, RL.K.5 to RL.K.7), on the read-alouds.
9. Non-fiction read-alouds (RI.K.1 to RI.K.10). Ten standards live here, and they will not be met by story books.
10. Word sorting and categories (L.K.5), which is vocabulary work disguised as a game.

The split-grade case

Kindergarten has the widest split of any year, and it is not between subjects. It is between what the child can think about and what their hands and eyes can do. A five year old can discuss a chapter book, retell a plot and hold an opinion while being unable to write their name legibly or decode “cat”.

• Never cap comprehension at decoding level. Nineteen standards do not care who holds the book.
• Never cap composing at handwriting level. The standards say so themselves: drawing and dictating count.
• Do cap decoding practice at their actual level. Text they cannot read produces memorization, which then looks like reading and is not.

Evidence and records for this grade

No state in this series tests at kindergarten, and in most you are not yet inside the compulsory system at all: Minnesota counts from age seven and Virginia excuses children under six from the evidence requirement.

Three things, and two of them are photographs:

1. A read-aloud log by title. At kindergarten this is the reading record. A list of decodable readers understates the year badly.
2. Dictated pieces, kept with the drawing. Write the child’s words on the page and date it. These are the clearest evidence in the whole year and they take seconds.
3. A note of where the sound work got to. Rhyme, syllables, first sounds, blending. Which of those are secure, dated.

See what goes in a homeschool portfolio, and printable packs for a dated paper artifact in a year that is otherwise spoken and drawn.

The honest summary

Forty-one standards, about 95 hours, and two things that matter more than anything else. Read aloud far above their level, because nineteen standards are waiting there. And do three minutes of oral sound work a day, because it predicts later reading better than anything else you could spend the time on and it expires after grade 1.

Then let them draw and dictate. Common Core wrote that permission into the standard itself, and a year spent on letter formation while the composing never happens is the most common kindergarten mistake.

Next is grade 1 English. The math for the same year is kindergarten math. For keeping it playful, interests as a gateway to the curriculum.

Sprout Lessons builds standards-aligned lessons for grades K–12. Start free.

Common Core State Standards © 2010 National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved. Accessed via the Common Standards Project (accessed 2026-07-16). This product is not endorsed by NGA/CCSSO. Standard counts in this guide were taken from that dataset, not written from memory. Your state may have adopted modified standards: check your state department of education for the version that applies to you.

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