This paper focuses on how parents, childcare personnel, preprimary and primary educators, and governments all have a role to play in supporting children's early literacy development. For two decades early childhood and literacy education journals have been filled with explorations about the perennial questions which relate to the relationships between home, childcare, preprimary, and school in the formation of children's early literacy outcomes. Literacy learning is a complex social practice which is shaped by the social and literacy practices in which children engage from 0 to 8 years of age. It is also known that literacy learning does not always occur in a linear and predictable manner, that the different ways children are able to take what is available to them when they go to school is strongly mediated by the literacy experiences they have from the time they are born. This paper draws on "100 Children Go to School," a National Literacy Research project funded by DETYA (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs), to explore how some children are able to make a seamless transition to early literacy whilst others, whose everyday home and preschool experiences do not fit with the expectations of preprimary and primary school literacy routines, find this transition far more difficult. It describes how some children go to school knowing much more about words than others. Also, it discusses how children's life circumstances related to family physical and mental health, poverty, and employment impacts on the capacity of some children to take up the literacy opportunities offered by schools. (Contains 16 references.) (Author/NKA)