ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the meaning of “communities of children” in the transition from kindergarten to school, analysed from the children’s perspectives. It is based on an ethnographic study, in which a group of Danish children were followed using participatory observation from their last year of kindergarten through to their first two years at school. The main argument is that, if we are to support children in their transition from one institutional setting to another, we need a closer insight into the everyday social lives of children. To understand the way in which children participate in the experience of starting school, we need to know about their possibilities for participation within the everyday social life of the school and their previous possibilities for participation in kindergarten or preschool. The results from the research imply that if children’s perspectives could govern practice, professional cooperation in the transition from kindergarten to school would focus on helping children – in concrete ways in lessons and during breaks – to develop communities of children with a focus on the children’s possibilities to participate in them.
