Thirty-eight rural kindergarten students participated in this quasi-experimental study designed to assess the effect of employing daily, sequential phonemic awareness exercises on kindergartners' developmental spelling skills. In September all students were assessed for letter recognition, symbol-sound correspondence, phoneme segmentation and blending skills, and developmental spelling level. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (revised) for receptive language was administered to show equality between treatment and control groups. Both groups received the same instruction on alphabet recognition and sound-symbol correspondence. In late February, after 5 months of phonemic awareness training, the 20 students in the treatment group scored significantly higher on auditory three-phoneme blending and segmentation measures than the 18 children who did not receive the training. On an assessment of graphemic representation of three-phoneme words, the 14 non-ESL (English as a second language) students in the treatment group scored significantly higher than the 13 non-ESL students in the control group. An analysis of spelling in the journal writings in March showed that five students in the treatment group compared to one student in the control group were writing at the phonetic developmental spelling level (Gentry, 1982). The majority of children in both classes were writing at the semi-phonetic level. Students in the treatment group demonstrated a more consistent skill at rereading their writings than their counterparts in the control group. The results of this study suggest that phoneme segmentation skill increases student ability to represent more phonemes in words they attempt to write. Contains 23 references and 11 figures. Appendixes contain evaluation instruments and various learning tasks. (Author/RS)