Singing games with infants in an Early Childhood Education Center

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the trajectory of singing games in a group of infants in an Early Childhood Education Center in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, between February of 2017 and July of 2018. Based on the principles of Ethnography in Education and Cultural-historical Psychology, we have been following this group since 2017 when they were 7 to 10 months old. We analyze the singing games in their double temporality, both its tradition as a game and its dimension of (re)appropriation by the investigated group. The activity of playing understood as a lived experience of the child in his/her social group integrates emotion, cognition, language, body, and culture. Our analyses focus on the trajectory of this play in the group and point to it as a social bond in which children and adults expand the possibilities of this activity and, therefore, the cultural development of the participants.

Keywords:
Infants; Play; Cultural-historical psychology