When your child begins school, one of his primary language arts objectives will be learning how to read simple words and phrases. As your child grows older, his elementary school teachers will focus on reading comprehension and helping your child make sense of the words that he is seeing on the pages. Reading is one of the most important language arts skills and is highly emphasized on standardized tests to determine how well your student is meeting your state's goals and objectives.
Writing is another important language arts skill that many college admissions tests, as well as some standardized tests, focus on. Your child will learn how to write basic letters and improve his handwriting up until the third or fourth grade. Once your child reaches fourth grade, the focus of language arts goals and objectives turns away from learning to write neatly and moves toward learning to write creatively and express his own ideas and thoughts. Book reports and short creative prose assignments are often assigned in upper elementary grades.
Having good written skills is extremely important, but the language arts standards, goals and objectives also call for students to have a good understanding of how to express themselves orally. As your child progresses throughout the younger elementary school grades, he will be challenged with giving short presentations in front of the class. A more common way, however, for young students to learn about speaking goals and objectives is to have students work in groups with their peers, which gives them a chance to effectively communicate with others.
Grammar is an extremely important part of the language arts goals and objectives that is emphasized strongly in both high school and college. In elementary school, one of the primary goals for language arts students is helping them understand how to use different words to create functional sentences. Students are also required to understand the basic parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions. They need to understand how to recognize and use the different parts of speech.