The strands within Scarborough’s rope represent the many skills that students need to develop in order to become skilled readers (Scarborough, 2001). Within the first core piece of the rope, language comprehension is built through background knowledge, allowing students to draw upon their knowledge of facts, concepts, and experiences to improve their understanding. In addition, the breadth and precision of their vocabulary allows them to understand a variety of words they may come across in their reading, while their understanding of language structures helps them to more specifically understand word parts. Students’ verbal reasoning, or the ability to understand inferences, metaphors, and other unspoken messages, allows them to build meaning beyond what is directly stated in their reading. Finally, students’ overall literacy knowledge of print and genres also helps them to build a general understanding of their reading. Within the second core piece of the rope, word recognition is developed through phonological awareness, or the awareness of syllables and phonemes within words. A students’ ability to decode using smaller word parts allows them to read a word bit by bit, while sight recognition allows them to recognize entire words at first glance. When all of these reading skills are developed through explicit reading instruction, these strands come together to make skilled reading increasingly strategic and automatic.