Literacy experts agree that a child needs to learn the following skills to be a competent reader.

- Awareness of print (knowing the parts of print: letters/words/sentences and their function)
- Phonological awareness (understanding how sounds make up the spoken word)
- Sound-symbol association (learning that each letter has a corresponding sound)
- Visual scanning (moving eyes from left to right to decode consecutive letters)
- Blending (sounding out a series of letters and putting them together to say a word)
- Whole word recognition (memorizing complete words)
- Comprehension of the meaning of words and sentences.