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Understanding how young children learn to write in their classrooms is important. Given that children spend a considerable portion of their school day engaged in writing tasks, the ability to write is critical for their success at school. In this chapter, we use data drawn from an ethnographic study of Australian children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to explore learning to write in their public-school classrooms from a socio-material perspective. In this chapter we are particularly interested in the discursive and material practices and resources that contribute to children’s experiences. We share survey data gathered from teachers in the school to contextualise writing pedagogies before we move to examine the perspectives of two case study children about learning to write over two years as captured through individual interviews, drawings and writing. The children’s talk and their drawings are treated as representations of the perceptions of their experiences with learning to write. The writing samples are used to examine how the processes and practices of learning to write, as shared by the children, are represented, organised and reproduced in the texts the children produce. In particular, we focus on children’s perception of writing pedagogies, teacher and peer interactions and their selection and use of materials in their classroom spaces to understand children’s writing development. In doing this, we aim to problematise normative definitions of ‘writing development’, as we lay out the complexity of children’s material and discursive work in early childhood classrooms.

This paper reports on a study exploring metacognition in young children. Developing metacognitive skills helps children become responsible and ‘thoughtful about their learning’ [Chatzipanteli, A., Grammatikopoulos, V., & Gregoriadis, A. (2014). Development and evaluation of metacognition in early childhood education. Early Child Development and Care, 184(8), 1223] and can improve educational outcomes [Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximising impact on learning. Abingdon: Routledge]. This paper explores how conducting video-stimulated reflective dialogues with young children about their thinking supported their metacognitive and cognitive development. Performance on a number of standardized tests was compared to that of a control group. Results indicated that the intervention group made more progress than the control group, became better at discussing their thinking and demonstrated an increase in metacognitive behaviours during classroom activities. The results suggest that VSRD with young children is valuable – as a participatory research tool, but also as a pedagogical strategy to support the development of metacognition and reflection.