The authors' interest in the associations between beginners' reading and writing performance led them to devise an index of children's meaning construction in reading by increasing the specificity of the Reading Miscue Inventory meaning change index to include finer discriminations between superficial and meaning disruptive miscues potentially reflective of beginners' writing errors. Additionally, the authors inserted textual disruptions in a story to examine the children's meaning making under formative textual challenges frequently encountered in emergent literacy engagements. Fifty-one 2nd-grade students participating in a longitudinal early literacy project read a story, the last quarter of which contained meaning disruptions. Participants' adaptations of these latter disruptions were compared with their meaning change miscue scores based on their nondisrupted reading performance. Adaptation scores were related to meaning change scores, suggesting that skill in adaptation to disruptions also reflects meaning construction processes, opening a door for manipulating textual discrepancies in order to document formatively, and thus find avenues for ameliorating, specific reading/writing difficulties.