Reflecting the work of Yetta Goodman on child language development, this paper examines Goodman's five "roots of literacy" and offers suggestions on classroom techniques for nurturing these roots. The first half of the paper explains how Goodman identified the roots of literacy and describes each of them, including (1) print awareness in situational context, (2) print awareness in connected discourse, (3) functions and forms of print, (4) use of oral language to talk about written language, and (5) metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness about written language. The second half of the paper describes learning activities that teachers may use to nurture the child's developing roots of literacy and to facilitate the development of cognitive clarity, which seems to be a prerequisite for successful reading. (RL)