Component 3: Comprehension and Interest
Standard 3.a: Children show interest and an understanding of a variety of literacy experiences.
By the following age ranges, children typically, for example:
- Attend to their caregiver’s voice when being held and read to
- Become quiet or show pleasure when an adult tells or reads a familiar story or rhyme or sings a familiar song
- Explore books with various senses (sight, touch, even taste)
- Focus their attention for short periods of time on, and actively participate in, shared reading experiences by pointing to pages, turning pages, and making sounds or saying simple words
- Request that adults read to them
- Point to and make sounds for familiar pictures, objects, and characters in books and photographs
- Make movements and sounds in response to cues in songs and finger plays
- Demonstrate preferences for favorite books
- Use words, gestures, signs, and/or expressions to request rhymes and rhythm games from adults (e.g., asking an adult by demonstrating part of a rhyme’s movement and combining the movement with words)
- Request adults to read books or certain pages in books to them (e.g., bringing a book to an adult while speaking words of request or making facial expressions that indicate the request)
- Use gestures, signs and/or body actions to indicate their interest in having a book read (e.g., nodding their head, raising eyebrows, and pointing)
- Prefer to listen to familiar or favorite books multiple times (at a single setting or each day)
- Actively participate in shared reading experiences by asking questions, making comments, and responding to prompts
- Demonstrate an interest in a variety of early literacy experiences, such as telling and listening to stories, singing and saying rhymes, and engaging with writing materials
- Demonstrate a preference for conventional books overboard books
- Enjoy books about a variety of topics
- Incorporate books or other print materials into their play
- Enjoy and ask to engage in book reading, book writing, or other literacy related activities
- Recite some words of a familiar book when read to (especially from books with repeating text)
- Recall specific characters or events from familiar stories and retell some parts of a story with prompting and support
- With modeling and support, anticipate what comes next in familiar stories
- Ask and answer questions about pictures in a book
- Explore a variety of literary genres, such as fiction, fantasy, informational texts
- Share opinions about what they did or did not like about a book or story
- Begin to understand the sequence of a story
- With support, retell or reenact familiar stories with pictures or props as prompts
- Ask and answer questions about main characters or events in a familiar story
- With modeling and support, make predictions about what might happen next in a story and determine if their predictions were confirmed
- With modeling and support, demonstrate knowledge from informational texts
- Respond to the question “what made you think so?” in response to their ideas about books and stories, with more depth and detail
- With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about unfamiliar words in a story or informational text read aloud
- Attend to and request longer and more complex books or stories
- Demonstrate knowledge of details from familiar stories (e.g., about characters, events, story related problems, and resolutions)
- Engage in higher order thinking during shared reading experiences, such as making predictions and inferences, determining cause and effect relationships, and summarizing stories
- Retell a familiar story in the proper sequence, including major events and cause-and-effect relationships
- Demonstrate knowledge from informational texts in a variety of ways (e.g., recognizing and describing the life cycle of a butterfly)
- With guidance and support, relate events and information from stories to their own experiences
- Ask and answer questions about unfamiliar words in a story, poem, or informational text read aloud
- Use new vocabulary acquired through reading
- Act out characters and events from a story, poem, or informational text read aloud
