After four years of studying "the students [they] worried about most," Betty Shockley, Barbara Michalove, and JoBeth Allen began to consider the importance of children's literacy experiences outside of school. While their students talked regularly about home literacy events, there was no real link between home and school: no way to learn what families valued and practiced, no way to communicate how their children were becoming literate in school. "Engaging Families" details how these teachers and the students' families developed respected partnerships in the teaching/learning process. The authors share what they learned about creating an extended literacy community, identifying the primary themes in literacy development and suggesting parallel practices to reinforce them. But "Engaging Families" is not a prescriptive text, it is a description of one particular effort, featuring actual voices of children and parents.