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Community Indicators

Aligning efforts at key points will move us closer to achieving our community goal of 80% of third graders reading at the College and Career Ready level.  

We worked with CMS, community partners, and national experts to develop community reading indicators at three key points: school entry, end of first grade, and end of third grade. These indicators are informed by state standards, state reading assessments, and high-quality research studies. The goal is to make it easier to coordinate and align community actions with grade-level expectations in the classroom and ensure more children reach College and Career Ready in reading achievement by third grade.

By school entry
The Big Five
  • Knows letter names
  • Knows letter sounds
  • Can recognize the first sound in words
  • Can write own name
  • Responds to and uses a growing vocabulary (from conversations and shared reading)
BY END OF GRADE 1
Comprehension Skills

  • Can read for increasingly sustained periods of time

  • Can ask and answer questions with evidence from informational & narrative text

Foundational Skills

  • Can recognize and read all 100 of the most frequent words

  • Is equipped to decode 300+ words (including one-syllable words containing common consonant digraphs, common long and short vowel representations, and common irregularly spelled words)

  • Can use common spelling patterns to spell words as they sound

  • Can read at least 39 words correct per minute (reading fluency)

Language Skills

  • Has an age-appropriate vocabulary (especially “Tier 2” academic words)

BY END OF GRADE 3
Comprehension Skills

  • Can read stories and informational text for increasingly sustained periods of time

  • Can answer explicit and implicit questions about both stories and informational texts using evidence from the texts

Foundational Skills

  • Can automatically read all 100 most frequent words 

  • Is equipped to decode 500+ words (including multi-syllabic words; words with inconsistent but common sound-spelling correspondences)

  • Can understand the meaning of common prefixes and suffixes

  • Can read at least 120 words per minute (reading fluency)

Language Skills

  • Has an age-appropriate vocabulary (especially “Tier 2 & 3” academic words)

  • Can interpret the meaning of unknown words using word parts and context

Download as a PDF
Who We Are

Read Charlotte is a community initiative that unites educators, community partners, and families to improve children’s reading from birth to third grade. We don’t run programs. We are a capacity-building intermediary that supports local partners to apply evidence-based knowledge about effective reading instruction and interventions, high-quality execution, continuous improvement, and data analysis to improve reading outcomes. 

Read Charlotte is a public-private partnership administered by the Foundation For The Carolinas.

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