Road to the Code: A Phonological Awareness Program for Young Children is an activity-based program designed to promote awareness in young learners that spoken words can be segmented into phonemes and that these segmented units can be represented by the letters of the alphabet. The program enables classroom teachers, resource teachers, and language specialists to fold activities into the curriculum early in the children’s literacy training, so they develop phonological awareness before they have a chance to fail. Studies have shown that the program is effective in enhancing beginning reading and spelling abilities in kindergarten and first-grade children who could not read and who knew few, if any, letter sounds.

Road to the Code provides 44 lesson plans that include games to encourage phonemic awareness. The games are

• Say-It-and-Move-It—the child learns to recognize phonemes by moving a disk for every phoneme heard
  
  
• Letter Name and Sound Instruction—the child learns the name of the letter that produces the phoneme heard and what the letter looks like
  
  
• Phonological Awareness Practice—the child participates in a range of simple phonological awareness tasks. 

The program is designed for use with groups of four to five children for four 15- to 20-minute sessions per week over an 11-week period. Flexibility is built in so that teachers can adjust their pacing to ensure that all children have an opportunity to master each skill.