“A friend who is a teacher says, ‘Reading is the new civil right.’ A child who can read is a child who can dream about the future…and make that dream come true.”

~Laura Bush, Early Childhood Cognitive Summit, 2002

Reading is a life-long skill that is necessary for success in our society and yet many students with and without disabilities have difficulty learning to read.  Recently, tremendous attention and research have been devoted toward finding out what works in teaching children to read.  The National Reading Panel has found that effective reading instruction focused on developing skills in these five areas: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension and oral reading (or fluency).  These five areas are now known as the 5 Building Blocks of Reading.