When I wrote my contribution to the original Reading For Real Handbook I drew upon my own extensive research on the oral storytelling of five preschool children who had had a very extensive exposure to books and stories read aloud to them at home. That study began in 1981 and now is nearly 20 years old. In my article I tried to show how the literacy environment of the classroom in some ways needs to reflect and to produce some of the effects of pre-school literacy practices typical of homes where reading is highly valued and has high priority. In 1993 I published a book which contains most of the implications of my findings, so in the present up-dating of my piece I do not wish to replicate what I have said very fully elsewhere (Fox 1993). However, what I found in my research remains relevant; my five young children’s oral invented stories revealed the extensive linguistic and cognitive development that is associated with hearing powerful stories read aloud in the early years. I asserted then, and still believe, that the emotional force of their favourite stories for my young children was fundamental to the stories they were able to tell themselves and to all the related thought and language that emerged from my analyses.