Before children can make any sense of the alphabetic principle, they must understand that those sounds that are paired with the letters are one and the same as the sounds of speech. For those of us who already know how to read and write, this realization seems very basic, almost transparent. Nevertheless, research shows that the very notion that spoken language is made up of sequences of these little sounds does not come naturally or easily as human beings.

The small units of speech that correspond to letters of an alphabetic writing system are called phonemes. Thus, the awareness that language is composed of these small sounds is termed phonemic awareness. Research indicates that, without direct instructional support, phonemic awareness eludes roughly 25% of middle-class first graders and substantially more of those who come from less literacy-rich backgrounds.

Although a number of different types of linguistic awareness are, in one way or another, presupposed in the dialogues and activities of beginning reading instruction, preschool-age children's awareness of phonemes of the speech sounds that correspond roughly to individual letters has been shown to hold singular predictive power, statistically accounting for as much as 50% of the variance in their reading proficiency at the end of first grade (Blachman, 1991; Juel, 1991; Stanovich, 1986; Wagner et al., 1994).

Furthermore, faced with an alphabetic script, a child's level of phonemic awareness on entering school is widely held to be the strongest single most determinant of the success that she or he will experience in learning to read or, conversely, the likelihood the she or he will fail (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986).

Measures of the preschool-age children's level of phonemic awareness strongly predict their future success in learning to read. Measures of school children's ability to attend to and manipulate phonemes strongly correlate with their reading success through the twelfth grade. Poorly developed phonemic awareness has been shown to be characteristic of adults with literacy problems in the United States (Liberman, Rubin, Duques, & Carlisle, 1985).

In our Reading Readiness Curriculum new phonemic challenges are presented in a gradual, step-by-step progression, with new challenges building on those previously introduced and practiced. The activities themselves have been designed in such a way that teachers can assess their students' progress by informally observing their responses and involvement. All of the sessions and games involve some level of active participation, giving children the opportunities to make up nonsense words or rhymes and actions of their own creation.("Phonemic Awareness in Young Children" by Adams, Foorman, Lundberg & Beeler).