The current study examined the effectiveness of small-group, direct instruction in phonemic awareness for kindergarteners determined to be at-risk for reading difficulties. Participants in this study consisted of eight kindergarten students at an urban elementary school who were identified as needing intensive intervention based on their performance in the fall on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy (DIBELS) tests of Initial Sound Fluency (ISF) and Letter Naming Fluency (LNF). The study was conducted using a matched-sample design, so four of these students received intervention and the other four students were placed in a control group. Each student in the intervention group was matched with a student in the control group based on similar scores on the fall administration of DIBELS. The intervention used in this study was the Road to the Code program. Participants received four half-hour sessions of intervention per week for twenty weeks. The effects of the intervention were measured by the DIBELS progress monitoring indicators as well as the benchmark indicators in the winter and spring. Results indicate that, although most students made gains overall, the Road to the Code intervention did not have a significant effect on the reading skills of children in the intervention group as compared to the control group. Challenges to implementing interventions in schools were documented, including scheduling, absenteeism, and behavior and attention issues. Other factors identified as possibly influencing the intervention were teacher characteristics, training of experimenters and teachers, and the ability of the intervention program to complement the core curriculum. Future research should focus on what type of core curriculum is most effective for improving the reading skills of urban populations and what supplemental programs would reinforce the ideas presented in that curriculum as well as response to intervention.