Young children use pretence in their interactions with their peers. This article focuses on their use of pretence to establish, define and formulate places within their peer interaction. A talk-in-interaction approach is used to analyse video-recorded and transcribed interactions of children aged 4—6 years in the block area of an early childhood classroom in Australia. The complex and collaborative interactive work of the children produced shared understandings of pretence, which they used as a device to manage their use of classroom physical and social spaces.
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