Elementary teachers today must provide more, and better, instruction in the content areas for their students than ever before. Many argue that the best place to teach comprehension is within the content areas, where literacy and content knowledge can be simultaneously developed (Moje, 2015; NRP, 2000; Pearson, Moje, & Greenleaf, 2010). The Common Core State Standards (NGA Center & CCSSO, 2010) suggest that for all students across all content areas, teachers must know how to provide a bridge for students to access content through literacy, while simultaneously supporting meaningful literacy development through rich content-area texts. However, experts in the content areas (e.g., professional scientists, historians, etc.) read and write texts in discipline-specifc ways. Thus, researchers and educators have recently suggested that in order to help students eventually reach higher levels of communication expertise, they need deliberate instructional support in discipline-specifc ways of reading, writing, and communicating across content areas and grade levels (Ippolito et al., 2013; Jetton & Shanahan, 2012; Nokes, 2008; Shanahan, 2012; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, 2014; Shanahan, Shanahan, & Misischia, 2011). Such teaching and learning has been most prominently labeled as “disciplinary literacy” (DL) instruction (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Research is currently providing educators with a more nuanced understanding of how experts in their respective fields approach reading, writing, and communicating in their disciplines (Jetton & Shanahan, 2012; Shanahan, 2012; Shanahan, Shanahan, & Misischia, 2011) and how these practices can inform teachers’ pre-service preparation to best support secondary education classrooms (Conley, 2012; Fang, 2014). Yet very little research has addressed how elementary children learn and demonstrate emerging behaviors and practices related to disciplinary literacy and which practices teachers might use to support this development (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2014). Therefore, this article is framed by and addresses three overarching questions: