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This article approaches newcomer migrant girls' experiences with social competition and relational aggression. This the authors do through a detailed analysis of the interactional practices that a group of preschool-aged girls make use of as they socially exclude one of two newcomer migrant girls from participating in a sharing activity involving self-made artefacts. The data is drawn from ethnography combined with video recordings of natural and situated activities of the girls' interactions in a Norwegian day-care institution over the course of nine months. Combining structural and social-constructivist perspectives, the authors discuss how a day-care group is a social field comprising multiple subfields characterized by agents struggling over position and power. Overall, this article addresses another side of the generally accepted positive view of day care for migrant children, revealing how relational aggression might be embedded within seemingly harmless activities and set in everyday child-governed activities. Finally, the authors reflect on implications for pedagogical practices and make suggestions for future research.

This study explores how toddlers and caregivers make meaning with an interactive healthcare game on a tablet during medical treatment. The data material consists of video recordings of six nebuliser treatments of two children. Using a social semiotic perspective and a multimodal analysis, the study identifies how children and caregivers make meaning with the game, defined as a multimodal text, through creating text events. The findings illustrate how the participants' meaning-making in the text events appears to have a narrative and an analytical orientation. It is suggested that the potential of healthcare games lies in the creation of text events where the game constitutes a shared focus. When children and caregivers share their meaning-making orientations, the medical treatment can be brought into the background.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study conducted with two Year 1 classes in two different Norwegian schools. In total, 35 five- and six-year-old children were involved in the study and were observed over a two-month period as they engaged in learning activities that involved drawing. Building on Kress and Van Leeuwen's (1996) theory of a visual "grammar", this study draws attention to the ways that visual features in drawings made by the children in their first year in school can be found to carry ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning. This paper discusses the similarities and variations in the types of meaning the children make and the interests that seem to have motivated the children. It argues that a focus on drawing can help practitioners support and promote children's visual literacy, and suggests pedagogical implications in light of the study. To begin, the research topic is related to a definition of literacy that encompasses multiple semiotic systems. (Contains 11 figures.)

In this article the author focuses on drawing-related interaction among 5-6-year-old children in two Year One classes in Norwegian primary schools as they engage in teacher-initiated learning activities involving drawing. Inspired in particular by Gunther Kress' semiotic perspective on drawing, the author presents four interaction categories to explore social aspects of young children's engagement in the process of forming visual-graphic signs that convey meaning. The author proposes that while the children's interaction can add support to the drawing process, it may also produce some risk for the children's confidence as drawers. It is the role of the practitioner to manage and facilitate interaction so that support is maximised and risk minimised. (Contains 6 figures and 1 note.)

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In a qualitative study of pre-planned and organized writing activities involving five-year-olds in two Norwegian day care centers, a specific preschool teacher practice was observed: the preschool teacher would visualize letters and words for the children; she would make appropriate writing materials available, but would refrain from giving the children an explicit writing task she would comment on writing the children themselves initiated during the activity and she would open up for an atmosphere of humour. This article explores how this teacher practice can be found to support children's opportunities for engaging with writing in different ways, demonstrating how children's writing is embedded in institutional practice. The approach is to analyze an episode taken from one of the organized writing activities and two texts written by two five-year old girls during this activity. The article builds on a sociocultural perspective on learning and writing that highlights the value of scaffolding children's learning to write, and applies Tharp and Gallimore's category system of the means of assistance as well as van Manen's ideas about the tact of teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents studies of 5-6-year-old children in year one in a Norwegian primary school as they develop and engage in drawing-related play within teacher-initiated drawing sessions. The author discusses the quality of the children's play from a semiotic point of view and reflects on play as a possible learning context for drawing. Elevating drawing and play to the same prominent position as images in contemporary texts, she demonstrates how they can be used to support children's competence in interpreting the visual mode as well as using it to convey meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]