This research is an eight-month ethnographic study of preschool children’s play narratives. Children’s play narratives are examined over time and across situations in the daily life of one preschool classroom to uncover the emotional themes of the play narratives as well as the social work of the emotional themes (e.g., build relationships, negotiate power, & construct social identities). The researcher visited the classroom two to three times per week over the course of eight months. Data collection methods included participant observation, video-taping, video-revisiting with children and formal and informal interviews with teachers. Findings revealed that children used specific play narratives, defined as “anchor play narratives”, which provided weight and grounding to their social relationships. Anchor play narratives were reoccurring themes that children returned to over and over again in the daily life of the classroom. A microethnographic approach to the discourse analysis of language use in the classroom was used examine two anchor play narratives: the kitty play narrative and the boyfriend/girlfriend play narrative. Findings revealed that female children used the kitty narrative to construct gender, to negotiate access into male play, to negotiate and contest positioning, and construct proper emotional display rules for females. Within the second anchor play narrative (boyfriend/girlfriend) children took up positions related to the romantic love storyline based on their social identities. The anchor play narrative constructed notions about the appropriate gender one could fall in love with, implicitly constructing emotional display rules about the proper and correct actions and reactions as females and male negotiated power and positioning in their social relationships. Children not only drew upon their gender, but also their race as they engaged in the romantic love narrative, which lead to a misunderstanding about the meaning of specific romantic linguistic terms used within their play narrative. Educators should become aware of the complexity of children’s play narratives in shaping children’s knowledge about their social and emotional worlds and how traditional roles and storylines support and silence specific emotional themes.