ABSTRACT
This chapter explores events from three early childhood social situations using a sociocultural perspective. Reclaiming early childhood literacies involves reclaiming the reality that play is a forum for intellectual learning in which meaning is composed and acted upon (Halliday, 1975). We describe how the context of play is central to young children’s language development, the early childhood classroom learning environment, and relationships, which are central to literacy learning. We contextualize our discussion with some background about our collective authorship and then offer an explanation of essential terms. We then present three examples and highlight the intellectual play in each and we look across the examples theoretically.
