A group of elementary teachers enrolled in a graduate class in language arts at the University of North Dakota explored how children construct their own meanings as they interact with texts. One teacher regularly read to her 20-month-old grandson, and excerpts from the journal she kept reveal that his understanding of a specific text evolved to the point where he was constructing his own special meanings. A second teacher read extensively to a 4-year-old boy, asked him to discuss the stories, and invited him to tell an original story based on a theme from the one they had just read. The boy's story had some relationship to the one the teacher read to him, but he chose to invert a number of themes, thus creating his own meanings. A third teacher asked her fifth-grade students to write reports and creative stories after observing an ant farm. The report allowed students to read and write about those aspects of ant life they found interesting, while the creative assignment encouraged them to consider the world from an ant's perspective. These teachers viewed comprehension as the result of a personal quest for meaning and encouraged their students in this quest. (AEW)