Lacy Manship co-founded ALC Mosaic, a self-directed school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has been a key leader in the early childhood program there for 13 years. Today she holds the space for reading and writing across the school: a Reader's Workshop where kids from five to teenager choose to come in and work on literacy while kids climb trees and dig in the sandbox right outside the door. In this conversation: what a ten-year-old gains by waiting to learn to read, why identity is the hardest thing to teach back, and what gets lost when writing becomes a rubric score. Fair warning: if you've only encountered literacy on the prescriptive timelines of conventional schooling, some of this conversation may challenge you. Lacy has spent decades watching kids come to reading on their own terms, and she describes what that actually looks like.  ...