Veteran teacher Rachel Harbison used vivid stories to involve kindergartners in sociodramatic play to motivate reading acquisition. Children learned through staged events that a mischievous Word Queen had planted "tricks" in the alphabet (i.e., the irregularities in English spelling) to prevent children from learning to read. The kindergartners banded together as "reading avengers" to master these tricks. Each visit from the Word Queen brought fresh havoc and renewed motivation to foil the plot. Posttests in May suggested that mobilizing children in sociodramatic play led to surprising growth in reading achievement.