I am constantly in awe about how technologically saavy my kids are. It's commonplace for them to just pick up a smart phone, tablet, computer, or whatever else fits in that category and begin doing whatever it is that they need to do - seemlessly as if they have been doing it their entire life.  The reality is they have been doing it for most of their lives. There is a night and day difference between what is available to my kiddos today and what I had growing up.

C-A-T. Sound it out. What does it spell?

Many of you may remember being taught similar exercises when learning to read, breaking down each part of the word until you could comfortably combine the sounds into a recognizable word. The smallest unit of sound, typically represented by a single letter or two letters together, is a phoneme. Phoneme fluency and knowledge is foundational to reading fluency and language mastery.