The following standards for K–5 offer a focus for instruction each year to help ensure that students gain adequate mastery of a range of skills and applications. Each year in their writing, students should demonstrate increasing sophistication in all aspects of language use, from vocabulary and syntax to the development and organization of ideas, and they should address increasingly demanding content and sources. Students advancing through the grades are expected to meet each year’s grade-specific standards and retain or further develop skills and understandings mastered in preceding grades. The expected growth in student writing ability is reflected both in the standards themselves and in the collection of annotated student writing samples in Appendix C.

Standards in this domain:

• W.K.1.
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• W.K.2.
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• W.K.3.
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• W.K.4.
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• W.K.5.
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• W.K.6.
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• W.K.7.
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• W.K.8.
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• W.K.9.
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• W.K.10.

Text Types and Purposes

• W.K.1. Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose opinion pieces in which they tell a reader the topic or the name of the book they are writing about and state an opinion or preference about the topic or book (e.g., My favorite book is...).
• W.K.2. Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose informative/explanatory texts in which they name what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic.
• W.K.3. Use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to narrate a single event or several loosely linked events, tell about the events in the order in which they occurred, and provide a reaction to what happened.

Production and Distribution of Writing

• W.K.4. (Begins in grade 3)
• W.K.5. With guidance and support from adults, respond to questions and suggestions from peers and add details to strengthen writing as needed.
• W.K.6. With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including in collaboration with peers.

Research to Build and Present Knowledge

• W.K.7. Participate in shared research and writing projects (e.g., explore a number of books by a favorite author and express opinions about them).
• W.K.8. With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.
• W.K.9. (Begins in grade 4)

Range of Writing

• W.K.10. (Begins in grade 3)