The rationale, development, and implementation of a reading program designed to teach disadvantaged children the skills prerequisite to learning to read are discussed in this paper. Of particular importance are skills in the recognition and manipulation of basic speech sounds, phonemes. The first of the program's three parts takes two and one-half months and consists of learning to recognize starting phonemes in words, recognizing letter shapes, and connecting the letter shapes with their phonemes. During the second part of the program, occupying approximately two or three weeks, children learn to blend phonemes into words, gaining practice in recognizing and manipulating phonemes in any position within a word. In the third part of the program, lasting through the remainder of the school year, children meet stringent mastery standards for reading with comprehension and learn new words by means of the techniques developed in the first two stages of instruction. When the program was used at two Chicago inner city schools, most of the students showed marked reading improvement. Discussion following presentation of the paper is included. (RL)