Play and Games in the Peer Cultures of Preschool and Preadolescent Children

This article is an ethnographic study of children's production and participation in play and games in an Italian preschool and an afterschool program in a Swedish elementary school. Most traditional theoretical and empirical work on children's play and games has focused on the contributions of these activities for children's development of social, cognitive and communicative skills. Other research has extended this developmental focus by examining play and games as valued activities in children's production, organization and maintenance of their peer cultures. This article extends this work by examining play and games as part of a process of interpretive reproduction in children's lives. We demonstrate how children in the production of play and games simultaneously use (as well as refine and develop) a wide range of communicative skills, collectively participate in and extend their peer cultures, and appropriate features of, and develop an orientation to, the wider adult culture.