PreK-2nd Grade Writing Present Levels & Assessments

Updated: March 14, 2026. Reviewer: Dr. Rose Sebastian, Ed.D.

How to Write Evidence & Strengths Based Present Levels for Writing

The writing present level is part of the academic present level and should tell us what exactly the student can do in the key areas of spelling, grammar, getting ideas down, and writing more complex compositions. If a student is writing at grade level, awesome! Put it in the student strengths section, not here. This section is for setting up the annual goals and helping us understand what special education services should target over the next year.

Sample PLOP #1
Sample PLOP #2

Deena is decoding at a late Kindergarten level (DRA 2 97%, DRA 3 below 85% accuracy). She can read real and nonsense one syllable CVC words with 67% accuracy. She knows 12 of the 40 Dolch Pre-Primer words. She knew 24 upper case letters, 23 lower case letters, and 24 letter sounds. In groups however, she is consistently decoding CVC words and reading decodable books of CVC words with few mistakes. She also routinely reads more sight words in group than she did on the assessment. Overall in group, she is beginning to consistently apply her phonics skills to reading and to understand how to read. She struggles with independently reading texts and fatigues after five minutes of independent reading. If she has a friend to work with, her attention span increases by a minute or two.

Deena’s comprehension continues to be significantly higher than her decoding. When she was read a mid-first grade text, she was able to give a fairly complete retell. She switched a character from an elf to a little doll but other than that her retell had all of the main events of the story in order. She has strong phonemic awareness. She can easily tell you multiple words that rhyme with a given word and can tell what sounds words begin and end with.

Marco is decoding at an early first grade level. In class, he is reading at an instructional F level and an independent E level (DRA 6 and4). On an assessment, he was instructional on DRA 4 text. He is good at sounding out words and can sound out 67% of real and nonsense one syllable CVC words. He needs support to sounds out words with digraphs, blends, and longer CVC words.

Marco knows all of his lower case names and letter sounds. He knew all of his upper case letters except for the J. He knows 31 of the Dolch Pre-Primer words and 25 of the 52 Dolch Primer words.

Marco is proficient at recognizing rhyming words and identifying the initial sound in words. He needs support with identifying the ending sound in words and often will just restate the beginning sound when asked what sound a word ends with. He has excellent concepts about print and is able to independently read a book at his level.

Marco strongly benefits from explicit teaching of texts and vocabulary in class. When asked about a text that his class has discussed, he is able to state five or more facts from the story in complete sentences like “the baby elephant gets milk from its mom.” When asked to give a retell of the DRA 4 story that he had read, he was able to tell the big ideas of the story, “The boy not find his his and her mom not… the mom is crawling around and the boy has his hat,” but struggled more with telling details from the story. His comprehension is better of stories that are read to him. He can give a good prediction for a story, tell where, who, and what is happening in a story. He can answer basic why questions about a story, tell his favorite part, identify the problem, and give a simple retell. He is able to make connections to the text as well. In classroom discussions, he participates when called on and is able to discuss the text at a similar to level to his classmates.

Assessments & Baseline Tools & Strategies for Annual IEPs

Writing strong present levels stars with collecting useful, accurate data. Some of that can come from classroom progress monitoring and some from individualized assessments, like the ones below and in our store.

With writing, use classroom writing samples, grammar editing sheets, and finished products– they will give you a good snapshot of where a student is. Just make sure you know how much the student did on their own– and how much a teacher helper did for them.

Letter Writing
Spelling
Writing Fluency
Story Writing

Assessing Letter Writing

The most fundamental element of writing is letters. When you are assessing what letters students recognize, you also want to assess what letters they can write!

IEP Assessment Resources

All you need to do here is ask a student to write upper and lower case letters in a mixed up order. What gets tricky is figuring out what you asked them to write! You want to give them a numbered sheet of paper and track on your copy what they were supposed to be writing.

Need assessment tools or help turning assessments into strong IEPs? The IEP Success Kit has comprehensive (minus a DRA!) reading, writing, and mathematics assessments for annual IEP and progress monitoring reports!

Assessment Tips

This one is pretty straight forward to administer. Sometimes it is helpful to know if they are doing reversals– if I see p/q/b/d reversals or other broader reversals I write them down so I can include them in the write up. If a kid writes only one or two letters correctly, I would only do one or two words from the spelling test and make sure that I take dictation for an extra writing sample.
I don’t specify whether a student needs to write a lower or upper case letter– and I count both as correct. You can test the two cases separately, but I have never really seen a major need for it (and it adds on pretty significant amounts of time).

Baseline Ideas

Karla can write 22 letters. She is still working on lower case “b”s, “d”s, “r”s, and “w”s.

Translating Sounds Into Letters

Spelling consists of how well students translate the sounds they hear into letters on a page. In addition to knowing what letters a student can write, you want to be able to discuss what sounds a student can write.

IEP Assessment Resources

There are a lot of ways to approach this task! Asking students to write sounds in isolation can be hard– if you do it, you want to include a word too like “write mmm, like in mmmouse.”
Another option is to come up with a list of CVC words that capture a wide variety of letter sounds and see what a student does– do they get the first sound? The end? The middle? If they can do that, how do they do with blends or digraphs?

Assessment Tips

The idea of this assessment is to determine what types of sounds students are good at spelling– are they good at beginning sounds, end sounds, or vowels? If they spell they whole word correctly, that’s great– just add that to your write up. If a kid only knows one or two letters, only do one or two words. If they are getting only one sound down for a word stop at “quiz.” Only do the blends and digraphs if a kid is recording sounds consistently. Also, “c” and “k” sound the same so they both get credit– we want to know if the student can record sounds not if they guessed which homophone was making the sound.
I included above an example of a scored assessment to show how students get credit for any letter sound they put down– there are no points awarded for getting a word right. What we want to know is what types of sounds a student can write– this is not a test of perfection! The goal is to tell families what a student can do, not what words they can’t spell– and to get information that can guide phonics practice.

Baseline Ideas

Rodrigo is proficient at spelling beginning consonant sounds in words. He can spell ending consonant sounds with just over 50% accuracy and short, medial vowels with under 20% accuracy.

Note: Because Rodrigo was at 50% on ending sounds and so low on short vowel sounds, we didn’t keep going on the assessment. You can choose to– but the goal is to say what a student can do and we are getting to a ceiling here. Your time is precious and so is your student’s!

Assessing Writing Fluency

Writing fluency is useful to capture if a student is at the point where they are consistently getting letter sounds down but getting them to write is a challenge (or a strength!). It is a fast assessment to administer and gives you a way to quantify for family’s how reluctant (or enthusiastic) of a writer a student is.

IEP Assessment Resources

All you need to do is give a student a piece of paper, give them a writing prompt and set a timer!
For students who are emergent readers and writers, I count anything they get down– the word play might be p, but I would count that as a word. My goal is just to capture how quickly they are (or are not) getting sounds on a page.

Assessment Tips

We want to know about how many words the student writes in a minute. We don’t care about spelling as long as there was a reasonable attempt to get sounds down. For younger student, one sound per word (l for like) is good enough to count as words. Basically we just want to know if the student can get anything down in a short time frame or if they need a much longer time frame to get their ideas down.
With all writing assessments, you might want to have the student read back to you what they wrote. Write it down next to their text– that can help you get a sense of what their spelling looks like in context and how they are thinking about the match between letters on a page and their stories.

Baseline Ideas

Megan can write between three and four words in a minute.

Note: If one of your big challenges in class is to get a student to try writing, I would add more like: In class, Megan is eager to tell stories and will dictate long, complex stories. When she is asked to write her own stories, however, Megan will often state that writing is hard or engage in a different, preferred activity, such as drawing.

What does a student do when you ask them to write a story? Do they draw a picture and stop? do they write a few words? All of this information can help you form strong, actionable goals for a student– and writing samples paired with a clear rubric are an easy way to communicate to families where a student is at and where they are working towards.

IEP Assessment Resources

You can give a student any writing prompt that makes sense to you! When they are done, ask them to read back the story to you and write down what they say so you can compare the story and the text.
You also also want a rubric to use to score the sample– the goal of the rubric is to focus on what the student is doing so look for one with strengths language (can and not can’t language).

Assessment Tips

Your goal is to write down things that a student CAN do in their writing. With the youngest/lowest students that can be challenging. So use the rubric to help you come up with smart things to say! If a kid is getting all ones, make sure you get a dictated writing sample so you can get a sense of how well they can develop their ideas. Don’t forget that pictures are part of writing…. and that if a kid is getting all 5s you should probably be using some of the assessments from level 2 with them.

Baseline Ideas

Student 1:

Kane is beginning to draw a simple picture in response to a writing prompt although right now his picture is mostly scribbles. He is also beginning to write letters when asked to write. Some of letters are poorly formed, but he knows the difference between letters and random shapes and is beginning to include only letters in his writing. He is also attending to the line when he is writing.

Student 2:

Paola is beginning to put down letters for the sounds that she hears in her writing. She is recording an average of two sounds per word and spelling basic sight words (is, go) correctly. She was able to write a simple three sentence story in response to a writing prompt. She can also draw and tell about a picture that matches the story.

What IDEA Says About Present Levels

Present levels are a key part of IEPs spelled out in the Individuals with Disabilities Act. IEPs in every state have present levels sections with similar information, but different formatting. To learn what these sections look like (and what to look for to know if they are well done) in different states, check out our state-by-state guide to reading present level sections. To learn more about what the law says about types of evaluations, visit our page on formal and informal assessments.