Almost every first grade has at least one Peter, one youngster who delivers the important note from his mother at the end of the day instead of in the morning and yet, he is not making much progress toward learning to read and write. He has all the characteristics that mark him as being one of those children who will struggle throughout his school career. This article presents Peter's story which is also a story about new visions of assessment embedded in collaborative teaching and multiple ways of knowing curriculum. This new view of assessment is predicated on an aesthetic view of literacy, a view that embraces the notion that literacy develops as individuals make sense of their lived experience using the full range of human meaning-making systems. From this perspective, print literacy is not a separate strand of knowing but rather a communicative skill that develops simultaneously with other knowledge and skills. This article discusses how the author and her colleague worked collaboratively in an urban first-grade classroom to develop curriculum that reflected the new ideas developing in the language education field and to experiment with new ways of thinking about assessment. It describes how they build their curriculum based on the three assumptions: (1) Literacy develops via multiple sign systems; (2) Literacy supports the process of inquiry; and (3) Literacy is shaped by the learner's theories about learning and literacy, and provides examples to show how they translated these assumptions into classroom practice in their first grade. (Contains 8 figures.)