The product of a two-year study investigating the literacy behavior of nine kindergarten students and their classmates, this report first explains the impetus and the theoretical foundations for the investigation and describes its subjects and setting. It then presents the methodology and the data collected from several related studies: (1) observer-child interviews that elicted information on students' general knowledge about written language; (2) observations of and discussions with the nine case study children as they first told, then dictated, then wrote two versions of an event; (3) records of students' efforts to adapt their writing to adult and child readers; (4) observations of children's writing on a recently shared event; (5) end-of-the-year interviews investigating general writing knowledge; and (6) two follow up studies on the children's reading and writing progress in the first grade. After analyzing the data, the report produced a number of conclusions, including the following: literacy develops prior to conventional reading and writing, all children do not follow the same developmental sequence in learning to read and write, and the teacher's model of literacy has important implications for children's development. Extensive appendixes contain copies of testing instruments and transcripts of observer-child interviews. (MM)