Research indicates that children's ability to attend to and manipulate phonemes is a strong predictor of their later success in learning to read. This explicit and sequential instruction begins with simple phonological awareness activities and then moves to the more demanding activities of orally blending phonemes to make words and segmenting words into separate phonemes. Such instruction provides children with an insight that words are made up of individual sounds. Gradually, they connect these sounds to letters and develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle.