Childhood is the crucial period for early children's reading ability building. Former research (Hanson & Farrell, 1995) found that early reading experience had a positive and long-term effect on reading competence for high school seniors in the future. Therefore, it is of great importance for researchers to understand children's initial reading abilities, their growth trajectories over time, and furthermore, the effects of child and family characteristics on the growth trajectories. The purpose of the study was to illustrate the use of the multilevel modeling approach to assess the early children's reading growth from their entering the kindergarten through the first year in elementary school. The research questions mainly focused on: (1) how child's reading ability grew over time, (2) how the growth varied across children, and (3) how some child-level variables affected the initial status, and the rate of change of reading ability over time. The data was collected from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). SAS PROC MIXED procedure was used for analyzing multilevel growth models. The fixed effects and variance components of the fitted models were interpreted. The prototypical growth trajectories of reading ability were plotted. The results indicated that children's reading ability improved considerably during the first two years of schooling. However, there was great variability in individual change over time. An additional finding was that the relationship between the initial status and rate of change in reading ability was positive and small. This study also found two child-level variables, how often parents read to children, and whether children receive pre-kindergarten daycare were significant predictors of the growth trajectories, either initial status or rate of change. Although tentative, our findings do suggest efforts for improving early-reading skills. (Contains 3 figures and 4 tables.)