This study compares first graders’ acquisition of literacy in two different instructional settings. One teacher used a traditional skill-based approach while the other one was identified as a whole language teacher using literature and writing experiences with incidental attention to phonics. During the school year, documentation collection about the pedagogy included questionnaires, field notes of monthly observations of reading and writing lessons, systematic collections of the activities, and analysis of the linguistic structures contained in the texts used for reading lessons in both classrooms. Data collection was conducted longitudinally and involved three tasks: invented spelling, oral reading and reading content recall. Various analyses indicate that both groups of children learnt the graphophonic system and were able to use it for encoding and decoding. Differences between the two groups were in the difficulties encountered in the three tasks. The influence of the way the teacher leads the reading lessons, the activities proposed and the reading supports used on first graders’ difficulties and the strategies used are discussed.