As children grow and learn, they will develop in a predicted order. There are skills and knowledge that they need to read independently. The skills included on this pathway are included because they predict whether a child will read on level by third grade. The pathway is broken into three different areas. The first stage is preliteracy skills, which includes expressive language, language comprehension, letter knowledge, and phonemic awareness. The preliteracy skills begin from the birth to five year olds. The second stage is the development of skills to decode. This begins to take place in Kindergarten and continues through 1st grade. The skills developed in the phase are letter knowledge, phonemic awareness, high frequency words, and phonics. The last phase is skills to understand , which takes place during 2nd and 3rd grade. The skills developed in the phase are vocabulary, fluency, comprehension.