Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades K-2. Jim Burke

      College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading K–12

       Source: Common Core State Standards

      The K–2 reading standards outlined on the following pages define what students should understand and be able to do by the end of each grade. Here on this page we present the College and Career Readiness (CCR) anchor standards for K–12 so you can see how students in K–2 work toward the same goals as high school seniors: it’s a universal, K–12 vision. The CCR anchor standards and the grade-specific standards correspond to one another by number (1–10). They are necessary complements: the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity. Together, they define the skills and understandings that all students must eventually demonstrate.

      Key Ideas and Details

      Craft and Structure

      Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

      * Please consult the full Common Core State Standards document (and all updates and appendices) at http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy. See “Research to Build Knowledge” in the Writing section and “Comprehension and Collaboration” in the Speaking and Listening section for additional standards relevant to gathering, assessing, and applying information from print and digital sources.

      Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

      Source: Copyright © 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.

      College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading

      The CCR anchor standards are the same for K–12. The guiding principle here is that the core reading skills should not change as students advance; rather, the level at which students learn and can perform these skills should increase in complexity as they move from one grade to the next. However, for grades K–2, we have to recognize that the standards were back mapped from the secondary level—that is, the authors envisioned what college students need and then wrote standards, working their way down the grades. Thus, as you use this book, remember that children in K–2 can’t just “jump over” developmental milestones in an ambitious attempt to achieve an anchor standard. There are certain life and learning experiences they need to have, and certain concepts they need to learn, before they are capable of handling many complex academic skills in a meaningful way. The anchor standards nonetheless are goalposts to work toward. As you read the “gist” of the standards below, remember they represent what our K–2 students will grow into during each year and deepen later in elementary, middle, and high school. The journey starts in K–2!

      Key Ideas and Details

      This first strand of reading standards emphasizes students’ ability to identify key ideas and themes in a text, whether literary, informational, primary, or foundational and whether in print, graphic, quantitative, or mixed media formats. The focus of this first set of standards is on reading to understand, during which students focus on what the text says. The premise is that students cannot delve into the deeper meaning of any text if they cannot first grasp the surface meaning of that text. Beyond merely identifying these ideas, readers must learn to see how these ideas and themes, or the story’s characters and events, develop and evolve over the course of a text. Such reading demands that students know how to identify, evaluate, assess, and analyze the elements of a text for their importance, function, and meaning within the text.

      Craft and Structure

      The second set of standards builds on the first, focusing not on what the text says but on how it says it, the emphasis here being on analyzing how texts are made to serve a function or achieve a purpose. These standards ask readers to examine the choices the author makes in words and sentence and paragraph structure and how these choices contribute to the meaning of the text and the author’s larger purpose. Inherent in the study of craft and structure is how these elements interact with and influence the ideas and details outlined in the first three standards.

      Integration of Knowledge and Ideas

      This third strand might be summed up as reading to extend or deepen one’s knowledge of a subject by comparing what a range of sources have said about it over time and across different media. In addition, these standards emphasize the importance of being able to read the arguments; that is, they look at how to identify the claims the texts make and evaluate the evidence used to support those claims regardless of the media. Finally, these standards ask students to analyze the author’s choices of means and medium and the effects those choices have on ideas and details. Thus, if a writer integrates words, images, and video in a mixed media text, readers should be able to examine how and why the author did that for stylistic and rhetorical purposes.

      Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity

      The Common Core State Standards document itself offers the most useful explanation of what this last standard means in a footnote titled “Note on range and content of student reading,” which accompanies the reading standards:

      To become college and career ready, students must grapple with works of exceptional craft and thought whose range extends across genres, cultures, and centuries. Such works offer profound insights into the human condition and serve as models for students’ own thinking and writing. Along with high-quality contemporary works, these texts should be chosen from