Final answer:
Early phonological awareness is a key skill that begins in Kindergarten and First Grade, involving phoneme segmentation and blending of single-syllable words, tested by measures like DIBELS Next and AIMSweb.
Step-by-step explanation:
The skill that typically develops in Kindergarten and First Grade is early phonological awareness. This critical foundational literacy skill involves identifying and manipulating units of oral language such as words, syllables, and onsets and rimes. Students are often tested on these skills through universal screening measures like DIBELS Next, AIMSweb, and easyCBM, which include tasks like phoneme segmentation and blending of single-syllable words without consonant blends. Early phonological awareness is crucial for the development of basic phonics, which is the ability to connect sounds of spoken English with letters or groups of letters and to blend the sounds of letters to produce approximate pronunciations of unknown words.