An understanding of how children interact with reading material in educational settings is crucial to the understanding of successes and failures in teaching children to become skilled readers. This report describes the development of a plan for observing, describing, and coding reading activities in a representative sample of classrooms. The observational system was intended to provide a unified, information-rich description of classroom reading activities and reading materials. A preliminary analysis was made of changes that might be expected in reading activities and materials between the lower (kindergarten through third) and middle (fourth through eighth) grades. The feasibility of detecting such changes in a corpus of coded observations was considered. After weighing the costs and benefits of collecting a representative corpus, it was concluded that current needs, both theoretical and applied, might be better served by small studies that focus on specific questions. (Author/AA)