The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of increased phonemic awareness instruction on the writing ability of At Risk first graders. Twenty-three students from a suburban first grade classroom in Central New Jersey were involved in the study. Twelve at risk students were divided into two groups, each of which received one half hour of daily supplemental reading instruction from the Basic Skills teacher which included phonemic awareness activities such as letter recognition, letter/sound correspondences, rhyme, segmentation, word families, and Elkonin boxes. The eleven control children received reading instruction solely from the classroom teacher who used a basal reading program. Scores from a pretest which was administered in May of kindergarten were compared to a post test which was given at the end of January of first grade and evaluated auditory discrimination, word awareness writing ability and writing samples. Both control and experimental samples made considerable growth in spelling and writing abilities from the end of kindergarten to January of first grade. The experimental sample demonstrated the greatest increases in the posttest results after increased phonemic awareness instruction, even though the control group had overall higher scores. Children who are low in phonemic awareness require explicit training in becoming aware of the internal structure of sounds in words which develops their ability to spell words phonetically. As the students become more aware of phonemes and their written form, they become more confident about their writing ability. (Author/RS)