This longitudinal study examined the relationship between kindergarten word writing andgrade 1 literacy in a large sample of Israeli children. In kindergarten, a majority of childrenproduced writing which displayed most of the graphospatial characteristics of conventional wordwriting, although only one-third of the children demonstrated a working knowledge of thealphabetic principle. Kindergarten writing significantly predicted variance in all three measuresof grade 1 literacy (decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension), even after controlling forgeneral intelligence. We also investigated the role of alphabetic skills and socioliteracy variablesin accounting for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. Kindergarten alphabetic skills(phonemic awareness and knowledge of letter names), but not socioliteracy factors (parental printexposure, parents' reading to child, and Clay's Concepts about Print), explained allthe variance contributed by kindergarten writing to grade 1 decoding and spelling. In the case ofreading comprehension, both alphabetic and socioliteracy variables were able to account for thepredictive power of kindergarten writing. As a precursor of reading comprehension, kindergartenwriting appears to reflect both domain-specific alphabetic skills and broader socioliteracy factorsunderlying the higher order cognitive competencies essential for comprehending text.