An ethnographic study of children's response to literature at a range of developmental levels and in a variety of natural classroom contexts involved comprehensive classroom observations of 90 children aged five to eleven years representing a range of abilities. Data were collected during a four-month period on daily log sheets, then later classified into (1) listening behaviors, (2) contact with books, (3) acting on the impulse to share, (4) oral responses, (5) actions and drama, (6) making things, and (7) writing. Examples of students' responses were compared according to age level differences, and teacher strategies of manipulating contextual settings were categorized. Among the connections identified from the data were that the direct accessibility of a book seemed to be of primary importance in children's willingness to express any response to it at all, and that the most powerful feature of classroom contexts was their manipulation by teachers. (AEA)