Pittsburgh Reads includes over 100 interactive videos, rooted in the science of reading.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds – phonemes – in spoken words. For example the word clock has four phonemes — or sounds — c/l/o/ck. There is overwhelming research evidence that children need really strong phonemic awareness skills as a foundation for beginning reading and writing.

In order to read and write, children need to learn the sounds that letters make. This is why, in all of our programming, we teach letter sounds right alongside letter names. In our On Ramp program, we also include letter formation. Children learn by doing, and writing the letters allows them to look more closely at letter shapes and makes letter learning an active process.

There is some hard won consensus about the types of experiences young readers need in order to learn to read. Our goal is to get readers reading as quickly as possible. To do this, we’ve organized the letter learning in our lessons in a research-based order that will allow them to read simple words as quickly as possible. With just six letters children begin to decode a range of simple words such as at, mat, sat, cat, it, sit, mit, & lit. Learning letters is exciting, but beginning to use those letters to read is even more exciting!