This manual is designed to help Florida teachers incorporate assessment and instruction of phonological awareness into their pre-reading and reading curriculum. The first section describes what phonological awareness is and how it is related to reading instruction. It summarizes research evidence on the role of phonological awareness in reading growth and the relationship between poor phonological awareness and reading disability. The second section presents information about the assessment of phonological awareness. It describes how phonological awareness is assessed through sound comparison, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme blending, and factors that should be considered in selecting an assessment. Six assessments are then profiled with information on the tests' reliability, validity, and scoring. The following section describes how instruction in phonological awareness can be integrated into reading instruction. It recommends that instruction in phonological awareness begin with easier tasks and move toward difficult tasks, that it should be a regular part of the curriculum, and that instruction should involve both analytic and synthetic activities. Pronunciation suggestions for individual phonemes are also provided. The last section presents descriptive information about a range of computer software programs for home and school use in building pre-reading skills in young children. (Contains 31 references.) (CR)