"Teacher, I can read!" exclaimed Saree, a fourth-quarter second grader who was placed in the lowest of reading groups at a southwest side elementary school in Chicago. This was her proud announcement after three weeks of intensive intervention with Ms. Gomez, a student teacher in her final semester at Chicago State University. "Ms. Gomez, this book is too easy; we already read it," continued Saree, who should at this age and stage have acquired reading skills (e.g., phonological awareness, phonic analysis, and some aspects of structural analysis) sufficient to enable her to read with the levels of fluency and automaticity of an end-of-the-year second grader (Combs 2009). Instead, Saree and three other members of her reading group were emergent readers, demonstrating only some of the emergent skills (such as picture clues and phonemic awareness) typical of beginning-level kindergarteners. They were on the downward spiral of reading failure (Torgesen 2004) so typical of many low-income children who matriculate through school without first acquiring core skills such as phonemic and phonological awareness (Allen and Sethi 2004). This article shares how Ms. Gomez interrupted the downward spiral of four struggling students and put them on the road to reading success.