Phonological awareness is an auditory skill that involves an understanding of the sounds of spoken words. It includes being able to recognize individual words in a spoken sentence, blending and segmenting words into syllables, recognizing and producing rhyming words, identifying words that sound the same at the beginning/middle/end, and blending, segmenting, and manipulating words at the phoneme or single-sound level. Because phonological awareness begins before children have learned a set of letter‐sound correspondences, teaching phonological awareness does not require print. Phonological awareness represents a crucial step toward understanding that letters or groups of letters can represent phonemes or sounds (the alphabetic principle). This understanding is highly predictive of success in beginning reading. Phonological awareness instruction should be brief and occur throughout the day.