WaKIDS – Kindergarten Families
GOLD® Objectives and Dimensions (WaKIDS)

Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills (WaKIDS) is a process of connecting families, elementary schools and early education programs so that new kindergartners can be ready to start school.
All Washington public elementary schools participate in WaKIDS, which includes 3 elements:
Social–Emotional
- Regulates own emotions and behaviors
- Manages feelings
- Follows limits and expectations
- Takes care of own needs appropriately
- Establishes and sustains positive relationships
- Interacts with peers
- Participates cooperatively and constructively ingroup situations
- Balances needs and rights of self and others
- Solves social problems
Physical
- Demonstrates traveling skills
- Demonstrates balancing skills
- Demonstrates fine-motor strength and coordination
- Uses fingers and hands
- Uses writing and drawing tools
Language
- Listens to and understands increasinglycomplex language
- Comprehends language
- Follows directions
- Uses language to express thoughts and needs
- Speaks clearly
- Uses appropriate conversational and othercommunication skills
- Engages in conversations
Cognitive
- Demonstrates positive approaches to learning
- Attends and engages
- Persists
- Solves problems
- Remembers and connects experiences
- Recognizes and recalls
- Uses classification skills
- Uses symbols and images to represent somethingnot present
- Thinks symbolically
- Literacy
- Demonstrates phonological awareness
- Notices and discriminates rhyme
- Notices and discriminates smaller and smaller units of sound
- Demonstrates knowledge of the alphabet
- Identifies and names letters
- Uses letter–sound knowledge
- Demonstrates knowledge of print and its uses
- Uses print concepts
- Comprehends and responds to books andother texts
- Uses emergent reading skills
- Demonstrates emergent writing skills
- Writes name
- Mathematics
- Uses number concepts and operations
- Counts
- Quantifies
- Connects numerals with their quantities
- Explores and describes spatial relationshipsand shapes
- Understands shapes