Extracted from a doctoral thesis on young children's emergent literacy, this paper describes the literacy development of one five-year-old subject. The paper first describes the subject's home environment, her relationships with family members, and her early reading experience and literacy development. Transcripts illustrating her home reading experiences and samples of her writing are included. The paper then describes the kindergarten environment that the subject entered following five months of home observation and details her free play activities and literacy activities during circle time and work time. The paper concludes with a comparison of the literacy experiences in the two settings, noting that they differed mainly in terms of content and the nature of the interaction: at home, the "what" of literacy was very much a part of her life and was endowed with meaning; the "what" in kindergarten was carefully controlled and transmitted within a predetermined readiness model, where activities were often not placed in a meaningful context and were not varied according to developmental levels. The paper notes that, overall, the subject's literacy development appeared to be more the result of the activities at home rather than at school. (HTH)