Early emergent and emergent readers will love learning alphabet and beginning phonics skills with colorful, tactile Reading Rods. By connecting letter and picture rods, children develop valuable early reading skills, such as recognizing uppercase and lowercase letters, identifying phonemes, practicing letter - sound correspondence, sequencing letters of the alphabet, building first words and more. Color - coding helps students differentiate consonants (blue) and vowels (red). Convenient storage bucket contains 108 rods, including vowels, consonants, pictures with initial vowel sounds and pictures with initial consonant sounds. Use alone or with any Reading Rods Phonemic Awareness materials.