This article takes a look at Reading Recovery lesson elements to compare the teaching and learning within the lesson components to several areas of learning that have been identified at the national level as important to children's literacy learning. The lesson elements examined in the article are: (1) phonological awareness; (2) orthographic awareness; and (3) word learning in reading and writing. The article states that the first two areas of knowledge, and the way they are interrelated, contribute to young children's growth in the ability to solve words while reading for meaning, while the third area strongly supports learning in the first two areas and also helps to accelerate early learning in literacy. These elements together contribute to the child's development of a larger process in which the reader uses "in-the-head" strategies in an efficient way to access and orchestrate a variety of information, including meaning and language systems, with the visual and phonological information in print. The article provides a definition and description of each of the three foundational components of early literacy. It describes and discusses seven components of the Reading Recovery lesson, identifying within each the potential for supporting children's learning in the areas of phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, and word recognition. Contains 3 figures and 15 references. (NKA)