A child who has difficulty reading may have difficulty with one or two important skills needed for reading. Your child may have difficulty with the language comprehension or word recognition strand of Holly Scarborough's reading model (17). According to Scarborough, (17) word recognition is divided into three skills: “phonological awareness, decoding and visual recognition”. The skills are then broken down into smaller skills such as alphabetic principle, phonological awareness, and phonetic correspondences (Scarborough 17). The alphabetic principle is an imperative aspect of decoding, and the principle alone is not sufficient to develop good decoding skills. The principle is the awareness that letters in written words represent phonemes in spoken words. Understanding the alphabetic principle along with sound-spelling correspondence allows the reader to develop strong decoding skills. Purcell-Gates states: “Learning to “read” those funny marks on the page by applying “decoding” rules was equivalent to expecting people to “read” the pattern of tree branches” (80)....