A child with reading difficulties may have difficulty in one or two important skills necessary for reading. The child may have difficulty with language comprehension or with the word recognition portion of the Holly Scarborough reading model (17). According to Scarborough (17), word recognition is broken down 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 sound-spelling 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 to know that the letters of written words represent the phonemes of spoken words. Understanding the alphabetic principle as well as spelling-sound correspondence allows the reader to develop strong decoding skills. Purcell-Gates says: "Learning to 'read' these odd marks on the page by applying 'decoding' rules was akin to expecting people to 'read' the patterns on the branches of trees.” (80)....