By this point in the school year, the initial shock of seeing where some of our kindergarten students begin academically should hopefully be starting to wear off.
In those first few weeks of school, kindergarten teachers are often faced with a wide range of incoming skills. Some students arrive recognizing letters, identifying sounds, and beginning to read simple words. Others are still learning to recognize their own letters, connect letters to sounds, or understand how the sounds in spoken words work together.
That range can feel overwhelming, especially when we consider how much kindergarten students are expected to learn in a single school year.
But as we move further into the fall, something important should be happening: we should be starting to see growth.
The Starting Point Is Not the End Point
One of the most important things to remember about kindergarten is that our students' entry skills are just that-a starting point.
A student who enters kindergarten without knowing letter names or sounds is not destined to struggle with reading. A student who cannot yet blend three sounds into a word is not necessarily going to remain behind. What matters is how we respond to those starting points and whether students are making meaningful progress with the instruction they receive.
By this point in the year, we should be looking beyond the initial differences we noticed in September. We should be asking:
Are students recognizing more letters than they did at the beginning of the year?
Are they making stronger connections between letters and sounds?
Are they developing phonemic awareness skills, such as identifying, blending, and segmenting sounds?
Are students beginning to apply these skills to decode simple words?
Which students are responding to instruction, and which ones need something more?
These questions shift our focus from simply identifying what students cannot yet do to understanding what they are learning and what they need next.
Growth Should Be Visible-and Measurable
Encouraging students and celebrating small victories are important parts of teaching kindergarten. But when it comes to early literacy, we also need to know whether those victories are translating into measurable skill development.
A student who knew five letter sounds in September and now knows fifteen has made meaningful progress. A student who can now blend sounds into a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word after struggling to do so a few weeks ago has developed a foundational decoding skill.
These gains matter because early literacy skills build on one another. Letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, and the ability to connect sounds with print all contribute to a student's ability to decode words.
Screening and progress-monitoring data help us see these changes more clearly. They allow us to determine whether students are making adequate progress, whether our instructional response is working, and whether adjustments are needed.
The goal isn't simply to document that students are behind. The goal is to identify what they need, provide it, and determine whether it's working.
Not Every Student Needs the Same Amount of Support
As students gain skills, we also begin to see more clearly which students are catching up with core instruction and which students continue to need additional practice.
Some students need more opportunities to work with letter-sound correspondences. Others know their letters and sounds but struggle to blend them into words. Still others may have difficulty with the phonemic awareness skills that support early decoding.
These students do not necessarily need the same intervention.
Effective early literacy support starts with identifying the specific skill a student needs to develop. From there, we can provide targeted instruction, monitor progress, and adjust our approach based on the student's response.
This is where a well-designed MTSS framework becomes especially valuable. Rather than waiting for students to experience prolonged reading difficulties, we can respond to emerging needs while foundational skills are still developing.
And when that support is timely, targeted, and efficient, we have an opportunity to change a student's trajectory before reading difficulties become more significant.
The Bigger Question: What Is the Data Telling Us?
As we move through the fall, I encourage educators to look closely at their kindergarten data.
Don't just look at how many students are below benchmark. Look at how their skills have changed since the beginning of the year. Examine which skills are improving, which students are responding to instruction, and where gaps are persisting.
If students are making progress, celebrate it. If some students are not progressing as expected, use that information to guide the next instructional decision.
And if a large group of students is struggling with the same foundational skill, consider whether there is an opportunity to provide more targeted support before those gaps widen.
The initial kindergarten reality check can be unsettling. But it should not be the story we tell about our students for the rest of the year.
The more important story is what happens next.
Are students gaining the foundational skills they need? Are we recognizing their needs early enough? Are we providing instruction that helps them move forward? And are we using data to make sure our efforts are translating into actual learning?
Kindergarten is a year of tremendous growth and opportunity. When we pair high-quality core instruction with timely, targeted intervention and meaningful progress monitoring, we can do more than identify students who are struggling.
We can help them build the skills they need to succeed.
And that is a much more hopeful story to tell.
