For years, reading teachers in the schools have emphasized word identification skills and believed that reading is comprised of a set of subskills that a child must master before he or she can learn to read. To teach a child to read, however, instruction must focus on comprehension. Therefore, word attack skills should be taught in conjunction with comprehension and applied in a meaningful context. When teaching reading, comprehension teachers should talk about the passage first, exploring with children how the events are related, how the author structured the story, and the words the author used to indicate relationships. The teacher can show the relationship of ideas and how sentences interrelate by taking a story and rewriting it a line at a time. Each line would be presented to the children with opportunity for discussion. Teachers can also show children that context helps one to predict much more than would the initial letter of a word or its length. In this way teachers can teach children how to use mental strategies to help them read unknown words. The use of cloze procedure and the avoidance of the use of worksheets are other helpful teaching strategies. Teachers can make reading easy by making sure that activities and materials presented to students are meaningful, by helping them to read, by giving them opportunity to engage in meaningful reading, by reading to them and with them, and by not interfering with the learning to read process by confronting the students with nonsense. (HOD)