Children enter grade 1 at an island school in Kosrae, Micronesia with a rich oral language and very little experience with print. One of the main tasks of teachers is to help children become literate. However, the literacy and assessment practices in this early grade classroom are limited and unquestioned. In determining how best to teach early reading in Pacific schools, teachers are faced with limited classroom resources, minimal assessments in the local language, and infrequent staff development. Relying on themselves (the principal and teachers), the community, the central office staff, and the support of a non-governmental agency, one rural school in the Pacific committed to a process of change. This paper chronicles the first year of that change--how one school, situated within a community of dominant oral traditions and a lingering colonial past, engaged in changing school literacy practices, including shifting its focus from assessment of learning to assessment for learning in early reading classrooms. (Contains 3 tables and 27 references.) (PM)