By 6 years of age…

…children are becoming more independent and experienced readers and writers. They learn many new strategies to find out what they don’t know and use the words and rules they do know to figure out what new words and information could mean. Early grade schoolers, given a good foundation of literacy skills since birth, become much more confident in their climb up and up. Their reading and writing muscles are growing strong, if occasionally shaky, and they clamber up the steps, looking back once in a while for reassurance, before they happily continue on to explore new heights previously unknown. 

    From ages 6 to 7, most early grade schoolers are steadily improving their ability to read. Kids around this age read for fun or for knowledge, though a lot of work goes into actually learning how to be a fluent reader. The children improve their ability to recognize words on the page and can read some of them aloud with ease as they expand their vocabulary with each new book they read. Early grade schoolers love to retell familiar stories they’ve heard and read out loud to those around them. When reading out loud and to themselves, they’re improving their reading speed and fluency, and they spend less time decoding familiar words and phrases. Even when kids ages 6 to 7 do make mistakes when reading out loud, they now possess the ability to go back and correct their own mistakes. Early grade schoolers happily continue to work hard at improving their reading skills and are sometimes able to recognize if they’re doing something wrong and attempt to fix it. 

    During grade school, children make leaps and bounds in their ability to comprehend new and challenging sentences and words. When a 6-year-old encounters a new word they have never seen or heard before, there is a chance they may attempt to sound out the new word to figure out what it says. They also will go back and re-read a sentence or the rest of the story, using context clues from what they understand from the rest of the story and some pictures to understand the new word or sentence. Then, if a child is really stumped, they can ask trusted adults questions about what is going on in a story, honing their understanding further. In early grade school, children begin learning the precious skills that allow them to understand a text and new words without much outside help. They begin learning how to repair the ladder and add the new rungs themselves, building their own path to new discovery and advancement.

    By early grade school age, many children often love to write. They happily write about topics they enjoy and relate to, like their favorite shows, their hobbies, their family, and a host of other topics they enjoy talking about and experiencing. Children around the ages of 6 to 7 begin to organize their writing into a beginning, middle, and an end, which helps to make their stories easier to comprehend, making them better storytellers and writers. Around this time, they start learning different spelling rules, like what letters should go together and that there has to be a vowel in every English word. They begin to sound out the words they’re trying to represent in writing, keeping in mind the spelling rules they also learn around this age. They also play around with punctuation and capitalization around this time too, though they don’t have a mastery over these ideas yet. In early grade school, children happily experiment with their existing language skills, honing their ability to convey ideas and tell stories, and working out those ever-growing writing muscles. 

    By 6 years of age, early grade schoolers have already developed a good foundation for literacy. They continue to seek information to satiate their ever-growing minds and begin to develop the skills that will allow them to one day be able to fully comprehend and read books on their own and write comprehensible and interesting stories of their own. Each new story they read and tell makes them one step closer to adult reading and writing competency that will allow them to explore the world unhindered.

References

• Literacy Milestones: Age 6 | Reading Rockets. (n.d.). Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/developmental-milestones/articles/literacy-milestones-age-6
• Morin, A. (2024, April 3). Reading skills at different ages. Understood. https://www.understood.org/en/articles/reading-skills-what-to-expect-at-different-ages
• Reading Milestones (for parents). (n.d.-c). https://kidshealth.org/en/parents/milestones.html
• [Photograph of a young girl by a window tracing the words in a book]. (n.d.). Retrieved April 13, 2025 from  https://www.readabilitytutor.com/my-6-year-old-is-struggling-with-reading/