IEP Goal Bank for Reading

Updated: December 26, 2025. Reviewer: Dr. Rose Sebastian, Ed.D.

Browse Common Core aligned goals in reading for students from kindergarten to twelfth grades. Find fiction and non-fiction comprehension, reading fluency, decoding, letter sounds and names, and phonemic awareness goals.

Our reading goals span the full range of K-12 needs, from building students’ phonemic awareness and their knowledge of letter names and sounds to their first sight words and learning to read more accurately or more rapidly– from students just learning to answer basic questions about what they see on a page to students identifying the central message of a story and reading between the lines. Reading is an academic skill, but it is also a vital life skill that can shape how students navigate the world around them and their employment options. As a result, we have put a lot of time into creating the more robust, most useful reading goals out there for you. Happy IEP writing!

Retelling a Story Goals

These elementary goals focus on building students’ abilities to answer questions about a fiction text and give retells that include key elements of the plot.

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Reading Level Goals

These versatile goals focus on having students move up grade bands in their ability to decode or understand text– or both!

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Reading Fluency Goals

These goals focus on helping students improve the number of correct words they can read aloud on a timed passage.

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Understanding Vocabulary Goals

These goals focus on helping students learn to use context and word roots to understand the meaning of unfamiliar words.

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Sounds & Letters Goals

These goals focus on the building blocks of reading– letter names and sounds and phonemic awareness.

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High Frequency Goals

These goals focus on high frequency words– words that are hard to sound out or so common that students should just know them by sight.

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Phonics & Phonics Goals

These goals focus on helping students learn to decode words sound by sound.

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Main Idea & Detail Goals

These goals focus on students’ understanding of non-fiction texts, specifically their abilities to find the central and supporting ideas in texts.

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Theme & Summary Goals

These upper elementary to high school goals focus on students’ abilities to summarize or find key themes in fiction texts.

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Making Inferences Goals

These upper elementary to high school goals focus on students’ abilities to read between the lines of a fiction text and to understand texts at a higher level.

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