This article takes a new literacy studies’ view on literacy as a socially constructed practice. In the context of environmental studies in elementary school, it looks at the development of literacy through literacy events, such as the reading of factual texts and completion of pedagogic tasks related to them (taking notes, filling in worksheets, underlining, etc.). First, a multimodal conversation analysis was applied to video-recorded data from two different fourth-grade lessons. From this, we identified a reading comprehension task that combined reading with a collaborative construction of questions about a text. This involved the students fitting their writing and editing activities to teacher-led initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) sequences, with both the teacher and students monitoring the temporal unfolding of activities. By video-shadowing selected students, we are able to show what the students take from the instruction and within which limits they make choices in their own actions. These are displayed through the use of tools and manipulation of textual objects.