Conventional empirical approaches often fail to deal with important dimensions of children's response to literature, such as the demand for repetition and successive responses, nonverbal modes of responding, and the nature of spontaneous expressions of response. In this study, using techniques borrowed from ethnography, a participant observer spent four months in one elementary school working with 90 children in three classrooms spanning kindergarten through grade five. Behaviors that revealed some connection between children and literature were identified and categorized as response events, with attention to their juxtaposition and sequence in the classroom. The distribution of these events across grade levels and qualitative differences in relation to age reflected familiar patterns of language and cognitive development. The occurrence and expression of response events, however, and some aspects of their quality, were tied to the social-instructional contexts of the various classrooms and were susceptible to the influence of the teachers who created those settings.