The authors advocate that a high-quality curriculum is an important first step toward good teaching and successful learning. Good curriculum comes from knowing what students can do, can almost do, and need to learn how to do as readers, writers, and language users. In this book, the authors combine their experience and learning in literacy development to create a tool that enables curriculum coordinators and literacy specialists to observe teaching and learning, to plan responsive instruction, and to ensure consistency across buildings, grades, and classrooms. The book places the behaviors and understandings children can be expected to demonstrate on continua that reflect seven instructional contexts: (1) Interactive read-aloud and literature discussion; (2) Shared and performance reading; (3) Writing about reading; (4) Writing; (5) Oral, visual, and technological communication; (6) Phonics, spelling, and word study; and (7) Guided reading. The first six continua are organized by grade, while the guided reading milestones are laid out level-by-level along the authors' A-Z gradient to facilitate reading instruction at the specific level at which it is most appropriate to support new learning. This helpful representation of goals for literacy growth make it easy to analyze whether curriculum goals are aligned among grades, buildings, or districts. They can serve as a foundation for the creation of responsive, flexible curriculum documents. And, they present the information in the authors' Continua for grades K-2 and 3-8 in a different organization that enables literacy specialists and coaches to effectively communicate commonly shared expectations that are grounded in research and expressed as teaching practices.