While much research and many curricula have surfaced for teaching phonemic awareness to young learners, we worked with preschool and kindergarten teachers who were frustrated with some children they found hard to teach. Many children easily grasped the instruction provided to them, but others were not catching on even when using suggestions provided in published curricula. We problem solved with teachers and taught them to make additional helpful comments during instruction that acted as scaffolds. Over time teachers learned how to use these scaffolds to differentiate instruction for individual learners. They learned when to use many comments (to provide higher levels of scaffolds) and when to use fewer comments (to provide lower levels of scaffolds). Teachers were able to ensure that nearly all preschoolers and kindergartners reached appropriate levels of phonemic awareness. (Contains 2 tables.)