The purpose of the study is to describe the development of different aspects of reading skills at the beginning of formal education in Slovak-speaking children. The study shows how reading develops from kindergarten to second grade in different aspects. The first part focuses on reading technique as a first step in learning to read, and analyses it from several different aspects: reading accuracy, reading speed and reading fluency. The study compares the development of those aspects through different reading tests. The second part is focused on another important area: reading comprehension. We analysed a sample of 187 Slovak-speaking children. We then identified groups of poor readers according to different variables. We followed up these groups and their performances in the early stages of reading development. At the end of the study we summarised our results in several practical conclusions in order to facilitate di-agnosis of reading difficulties.