Designed to help teachers monitor their students' progress in beginning literacy, this book describes some classroom observation tasks which have been used systematically by New Zealand teachers to guide their teaching of young children in formal school programs. The book is designed for: teachers who work individually with children having temporary difficulties with learning; administrators who want teachers to give them easy-to-read accounts of individual progress; students of emerging literacy behaviors who are training themselves to be observers of learners; and researchers probing how young children learn about literacy. Chapters in the book are: (1) Observing Change in Early Literacy Behaviors; (2) Reading and Writing: Processing the Information in Print; (3) Assisting Young Children Making Slow Progress; (4) Taking Running Records of Reading Texts; (5) Other Observation Tasks; (6) Summarizing the Observation Survey Results; and (7) The Teacher and the Observations. Administration and scoring sheets for the Ohio Word Test, the Ohio Stanine Score Summary Sheet, and the New Zealand Stanine Score Summary Sheet are attached. (RS)