A study examined the personal, social, and political functions that underlie the reading and writing that young children do about themselves, their families and communities, and their culture. Subjects, five third-grade children attending an inner-city elementary school, participated in an alternative language arts program involving independent self-selected reading of trade books, keeping reader response journals, sharing reading and discussion of self-selected and assigned books and stories, writing about their families, community, and culture, and sharing their writing with their peers. Working as participant-observers, two researchers visited the classroom 5 days a month for 7 months. Five students, whose reading and writing embodied a wide range of personal, social, and political functions, were selected for case study. Subjects were interviewed bi-weekly, and their written work was collected. Results indicated that: (1) the subjects used reading and writing for a range of personal, social, and political functions; (2) multiple functions were often associated with a single book or written piece; (3) the functions were frequently intertwined in mutually supportive ways; (4) the overwhelming proportion of children's reading and writing functioned in personal ways; and (5) subjects' reading and writing functioned in social and political ways, helping them to affirm or transform social relationships in their immediate worlds. Findings suggest that reading and writing are often used by children not only to construct textual meaning but also to construct themselves. (A table of data is included; 24 references and the coding scheme for reading and writing functions are attached.) (RS)