Phonics is teaching the correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations. Decoding is the process of converting printed words to spoken words. Readers use phonics skills, beginning with letter/sound correspondences, to pronounce words and then attach meaning to them. As readers develop, they apply other decoding skills, such as recognizing word parts (e.g., roots and affixes) and the ability to decode multi-syllable words. Students also learn to apply decoding skills to irregular words (sight words) that are almost decodable. We use an informal decoding inventory to determine a child's decoding strengths and our instructional focus.