Children begin acquiring understandings concerning reading well before they enter school and begin the kindergarten to twelfth-grade educational process. By the time children enter the formal K–12 schooling process, there exist wide differences in the development of a variety of skills and understandings related to acquiring the ability to read. The most obvious of these various markers seems to be letter-name knowledge.

At kindergarten entry most students already know the names of most of the letters of the English alphabet (Pearson & Hiebert, 2010, p. 291; Piasta, Petscher, & Justice, 2012). But letter-name knowledge should be thought of as an indicator of much more than simply letter-name knowledge. What letter-name knowledge typically also reveals is that children develop that knowledge in literate home and preschool environments ...