This research is an ethnographic study of literacy as a socially constructed process, literacy viewed as a part of the acquisition and transmission of culture. The focal population was a group of low SES high school students, most of whom were African American, and their children (ages 7 weeks to 4 years), several of whom were enrolled in a day care center housed within the large, urban high school their parents attended in a midwestern U.S. city. The research was an attempt to understand the kinds of literacy, specifically the types and amounts of reading and writing, that were a part of the home and school lives of the student/parents, and their parents, and a part of the home and day care lives of their children.