ABSTRACT
This book is a case study of a club established by a group of six and seven year olds in the playground of a New Zealand primary school. The club was called ‘fairy club’ and the activities of this club were recorded over three consecutive days during lunchtime periods. Fairy club was owned and led by one girl who was the ‘teacher’ and there were up to ten other members who were, mostly, her ‘students’. Throughout the course of the three lunchtime periods, the fairy club engaged in a number of activities that might loosely be described as pretend play similar to ‘playing schools’. Based on detailed examination of the children’s talk and interaction this book describes how fairy club was organized and used as a locus of order for the enactment of various sequences of action. The analysis considers the methods and practices through which membership and action were accomplished in fairy club, and how membership in the club and in categories such as ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ were relevant and consequential for the production of the play activity. The close attention on one particular game and one set of children offers rich insight into how children organize activity in the school playground, and more generally how children use interactional resources to produce and make sense of social action.
