Amid the bustle of play activist in the housekeeping corner of one kindergarten classroom, Daniel empties the cabinet under the sink in the child-sized kitchen. He removes the white plastic tub that represents the sink and inspects the remaining square hole. Next, he grabs two forks, crawls inside the cabinet, and flips over on his back. Stretching out his legs, he begins to poke the undersides of the metal faucets with the once-forks-now-wrenches. "I'm fixing the sink!" he announced to Ayeesha who peers down at him through the hole in the countertop. Immediately, she picks up a nearby fork and reaches down through the sink opening to help him fix the imaginary pipes. And so, a fork becomes a wrench. As children represent the world through their play, writing, drawing, and construction, they simply and flexibly use whatever "comes to hand" and seems apt for their particular message. Kress (2003b) suggests that children as players and designers strategically emphasize salient features of objects to represent essential aspects of the surrounding reality: Daniel emphasized the lever function of a fork and exploited its potential as a stand-in for a wrench by simply using it to pry at the metal faucets, a transformation bolstered by his sink-fixing supine position and a strip of language, "I'm fixing the sink!" From this four-Mapping Modes 2 word utterance, a twisting gesture, and two legs poking out of a sink cabinet context, Ayeesha immediately recognized the fork as a wrench and took up her own fork/wrench without an explicit explanation. Ayeesha and Daniel along with Mitchell, Jack and Stephen, whom you will meet later in this chapter, were students in a kindergarten classroom that I studied for one school year. In their classroom, I examined how the children's play and design 1 activity transformed materials in ways that shaped their classroom participation and peer power relations. While Ayeesha and Daniel used play to transform plastic forks for their imaginary plumbing scenario, other children used design to transform art materials into paper toys. Mitchell, Jack, and Stephen regularly sat together at the kindergarten art table where they experimented with new ways of handling tools such as scissors and tape and engaged in friendly competitions such as who was the best "draw-er" or who knew the "hardest" math facts. Multimodal analysis of the boys' activity at the art table reveals how making a SpongeBob SquarePants puppet allowed Mitchell to demonstrate his status as a 6-year-old design expert to his tablemates. Multimodal Analysis Recently, the field of critical discourse studies has expanded to include "nonverbal (semiotic, multimodal, visual) aspects of interaction and communication" (Wodak & Meyer, 2009, p. 2). Similarly, definitions of literacy have expanded to include embodied and visual ways of producing signs as multimodal literacies comprised of physical actions with bodies, objects, and images that represent and interpret ideas (Kress, 1997; Siegel, 2006; Wohlwend, 2008). van Leeuwen (2008) argues ...

Drawing upon theories that reconceptualize toys and artifacts as identity texts, this study employs mediated discourse analysis to examine children's videotaped writing and play interactions with princess dolls and stories in one kindergarten classroom. The study reported here is part of a three-year ethnographic study of literacy play in U.S. early-childhood classrooms. The specific focus here is on young girls who are avid Disney Princess fans and how they address the gendered identities and discourses attached to the popular films and franchised toys. The study employs an activity model design that incorporates ethnographic microanalysis of social practices in the classroom, design conventions in toys and drawings, negotiated meanings in play, and identities situated in discourses. The commercially given gendered princess identities of the dolls, consumer expectations about the dolls, the author identities in books and storyboards associated with the dolls, and expectations related to writing production, influenced how the girls upheld, challenged, or transformed the meanings they negotiated for princess storylines and their gender expectations which influenced who participated in play scenarios and who assumed leadership roles in peer and classroom cultures. When the girls played with Disney Princess dolls during writing workshop, they animated identities sedimented into toys and texts. Regular opportunities to play with toys during writing workshop allowed children to improvise and revise character actions, layering new story meanings and identities onto old. Dolls and storyboards facilitated chains of animating and authoring, linking meanings from one event to the next as they played, wrote, replayed, and rewrote. The notion of productive consumption explains how girls enthusiastically took up familiar media narratives, encountered social limitations in princess identities, improvised character actions, and revised storylines to produce counter-narratives of their own.

In this article, semiotic analysis of children's practices and designs with video game conventions considers how children use play and drawing as spatializing literacies that make room to import imagined technologies and user identities. Microanalysis of video data of classroom interactions collected during a three year ethnographic study of children's literacy play in kindergarten and primary classrooms reveals how the leading edge of technology use in print-centric classrooms is pretended into being by five-, six-, and seven-year-old `early adopters' — a marketing term for first wave consumers who avidly buy and explore newly-released technology products.`Early adopters' signals two simultaneous identities for young technology users: (1) as developing learners of new literacies and technologies; and, (2) as curious explorers who willingly play with new media. Children transformed paper and pencil resources into artifacts for enacting cell phone conversations and animating video games, using new technologies and the collaborative nature of new literacies to perform literate identities and to strengthen the cohesiveness of play groups.

The Maker movement promotes hands-on making, including crafts, robotics, and computing. The movement's potential to transform education rests in our ability to address notable gender disparities, particularly in STEM fields. E-textiles-the first femaledominated computing community-provide inspiration for overcoming longstanding cultural divides in classrooms. Analysis of children's use of e-textiles reveals that materials like needles, fabric, and conductive thread rupture traditional gender scripts around electronics and implicitly gives girls hands-on access and leadership roles. This reconceptualization of cultural divides as sets of tacitly accepted practices rooted in gendered histories has implications for reconceptualizing traditionally male-dominated areas of schooling.

Drawing from critical sociocultural perspectives that view play, literacy, and gender as social practices, boys" Disney Princess play is examined as a site of identity construction and contestation situated within overlapping communities of femininity and masculinity practice where children learn expected practices for "doing gender." The article presents critical discourse analysis of two instances of 5-and 6-year-old children"s doll play excerpted from data collected during a year of weekly visits to one focal kindergarten in a U.S. Midwest public school, part of a larger three-year study of literacy play as mediated discourse. Through princess play, children enacted femininities and masculinities and negotiated character roles with peers in ways that enforced and contested gender expectations circulated in media marketing and enacted in play groups. Findings indicate that doll play is a productive pedagogy for mediating gendered identity texts circulating through global media and for creating spaces for diverse gender performances in early childhood settings.