The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic challenged the education system across the world by forcing school buildings to close and educators to shift entirely to remote teaching overnight without formal training or practice. The purpose of this paper is to describe primary teachers' (grades K-3) challenges with remote literacy instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Technological, Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK; Mishra & Koehler, 2006) framework was used to examine the K-3 teachers' challenges when teaching literacy content remotely and the extent to which these three elements (technology, pedagogy, and content) were altered to specifically meet the professional development needs of teachers teaching in an extraordinary situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic. An open-ended online questionnaire completed by 300 respondents revealed that providing and administering rigorous, high-quality differentiated beginning reading and writing instruction and assessments in both synchronous and asynchronous learning formats was a challenge. Professional development was relegated to a techno-centric approach to planning remote literacy instruction. This article includes suggestions for dealing with primary grade teachers' instructional challenges and professional development needs associated with remote early literacy teaching, including developing collaborative structures such as virtual mentor coaching and virtual professional learning networks for planning and assessing remote early literacy instruction.