This article is very interesting to me because it’s something I deal with on a daily basis. Trying to get my kindergarteners to be reading at the new benchmark levels set by our district through Common Core has become increasingly difficult. In this article, the teacher researchers found that many kindergarten and first-grade students did not have the reading readiness skills to be reading at their benchmark target. The purpose of the project was to improve the students overall reading ability. The project was for about four months. There were 74 students and 74 parents that participated in this research study. The teacher researchers noticed that the students lacked reading readiness skills that were necessary to meet grade level benchmarks. The teacher researchers used a parent survey, baseline assessments, and observational checklist to document evidence. The teacher researchers found from the parent survey that students who lacked interest in books and reading them demonstrated low reading readiness skills. The baseline assessment the students took showed an overall weakness in letter identification, initial sounds, medial sounds, and ending sounds. The observational checklist indicated difficulty with segmenting sounds, letter sound knowledge, inability to rhyme, decoding difficulties and reading miscues, poor comprehension, lack of interest in books, lack of print awareness skills, poor attentions spans, lack of response during whole group instruction, and off-task behaviors. The teacher researchers used a variety of interventions to improve their students overall reading skills. These interventions included small guided reading groups, word work, phonemic awareness drills, and posters that gave visual clues on how to decode unknown words. In the guided reading groups the students were paired with other students at their same reading ability. Flashcards were