This article describes the usage of linguistic units and instructional strategies that facilitate word recognition for Latino kindergarten students who are beginning to read in Spanish. This case study was based on coding videotaped reading and language arts instruction of two bilingual kindergarten teachers at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year using the Elements of Word Identification Instruction (Denton, Mathes, & Anthony, 2002), in addition to classroom field notes, narrative descriptions of instructional methods, and an end-of-the-year semistructured interview with the teachers. Results show that although Spanish has consistent letter-sound mappings, beginning reading instruction may focus on instruction at the word level, with phonemes playing a role in error correction, writing and spelling, phonemic awareness, and remediation for struggling readers who cannot read words fluently. This article concludes with implications for further research and discusses the significance of scaffolding word-recognition instruction at the phoneme level.