The purpose of this book is to assist teachers as they work with emergent readers and writers--children who are in the early stages of reading and writing development, typically in preschool through grade 2. Section 1 of the book presents an overview of emergent literacy. Section 2 consists of a group of 15 informal early literacy pretests. The major areas covered by the assessments are: attitudes and experiences, retelling, literacy knowledge, wordless picture reading, auditory discrimination, rhyme detection, alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, writing, spelling, phonics, decoding, caption reading, basic sight word knowledge, and passage reading. Also provided in section 2 are all of the materials needed to assess children's knowledge, concise directions, and a reproducible Record Booklet. Section 3 contains over 225 teaching strategies and activities in 15 different areas to aid teachers in assisting children with their literacy development. Section 4 contains posttests for the informal literacy assessments. Similar to the pretests, these assessments can be used to help evaluate children's learning. Appendixes contain addresses of professional organizations and agencies, lists of word families for reference and instruction, sight word lists, and a continuum of children's development in early reading and writing. (RS)