In this article, we summarize a good portion of the CASL research program on reading in the early grades. We first describe investigations conducted in kindergarten, where our focus was on the development of decoding and word recognition. Then we discuss studies conducted in first grade, where we continued to emphasize decoding and word recognition but expanded our focus to include fluency and comprehension. In explaining the methods of these studies, we provide the greatest detail for the first study, at kindergarten. Our description of subsequent studies is more concise because they share many methodological features with the first kindergarten study. Before closing, we offer several conclusions about practice and future research.