Building Foundational Literacy: Beginnings introduces beginning and final consonants, the short-vowel a, and 31 high-frequency and short-a words. An efficient program, Beginnings is designed so that students begin reading words after learning just a few phonics elements. After learning the correspondences s/s/, m/m/, t/t/, and c/c/, students are introduced to a/a/ so that they can begin to form and read words, such as, at, cat, mat, sat. They also learn a few high-frequency words, such as I, see