Toddler interaction during play in the Swedish preschool

This article focuses on how children aged 17–24 months initiate play and interact with their peers during self-initiated play in preschools. Play is looked upon as a rich arena for observing toddler interaction. The ethnographic study was carried out in a toddler unit with 15 children. Six one-year-old girls and boys were observed during five weeks at the end of a longer research period. The study follows a phenomenological tradition with participatory observations and video recordings. The overall findings support a theoretical perspective where very young children are seen as social actors, with social competences. Play invitation strategies, as well as play enactment and play-closing moves, were mostly found to be based on nonverbal communication such as locomotion, gestures, physical actions and facial expressions. This study also shows that the competence of taking others’ perspectives was found recurrently in play among younger children. Furthermore, the young children used negotiating skills during their play.