This is the first in-depth study of gender issues in early literacy learning. It provides vivid portraits of the difficulties that both boys and girls experience in learning to read and write at home and in classrooms due to gendered divisions of labor in families and schools. The portraits are based on data from a three-year ethnographic study, in which "learning biographies" were constructed for thirteen children from their entry into kindergarten until the completion of second grade. The biographies show that in learning to read and write, children construct gendered identities and...