No abstract

In action research projects, creative, play, and collaborative activities intersect with early writing experiences in kindergarten and grades 1 and 2.

Christine Portier is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at OISE/University of Toronto. She is a former elementary teacher who now teaches graduate courses in elementary education and conducts research on young children's oral language and writing in play contexts in northern rural and Indigenous communities.Adam Murray worked as a teacher in the city centre for Edmonton Public School Board for ten years. He is currently the principal of Kennedy Elementary School and Grimshaw Jr/Sr High School for the Peace River School Division and an advisory committee member for the Northern Oral Language and Writing through Play (NOW Play) project. As a public school educator, he is passionate about teaching children to read, and he continues to research and implement strategies that close the literacy gap of early learners.

This article reports on research examining the social purposes of Indigenous kindergarten children's language and their construction of Indigenous cultural knowledge within and through interactions with peers during dramatic play and play with construction materials. The participants are three teachers and 29 children from two rural northern Canadian Indigenous communities that are accessible only by plane and winter roads. Data sources are video-recordings of the children's play interactions taken over 4 months and their teachers' perceptions of the Indigenous knowledge that the children construct in their play. Unlike results of many standardized oral language assessments indicating deficits in Indigenous children's language, our results showed that children used language for a wide range of purposes; a range that corresponds with results of previous studies of nonindigenous children's play interactions. Participating Indigenous children most often used language for learning and language for imagining in their play. Their teachers were heartened to see that their students, most frequently the girls, also used language for disagreeing and asserting themselves. Teachers felt that children were constructing powerful cultural identities that would contribute to positive change, if they could use language in these ways outside their Indigenous