Dossier | Listening and participation in research with (about) children Listening to children as they play A escuta das crianças por meio de suas brincadeiras La escucha de los niños a través de sus juegos Renata da Costa Maynart Lenira Haddad Maria Isabel Pedrosa Highlights Children are active co-participants and act in the environment to get to know it and position themselves socially. Children build meanings with their peers and create culture in play situations. Play workshops in research with children enable access to their meanings in interactions with peers. Abstract Utilizing interpretative resources available to them, children reveal what they know and create meanings with their peers. We then sought to listen to a group of seven 5-year-old children about a topic that is part of their daily experiences — the family. Through observation of plays fostered, video recorded, and qualitatively analyzed by the researcher, children appear to be protagonists of their microcultures in early childhood education: they create characters and weave relationships constrained to a family scenario. Therefore, listening to children means allowing them to express affections, interests, conflicts, et cetera, taking them as evidence of their understanding and conceptions. Resumo | Resumen Keywords Listening to children. Play. Early Childhood Education. Peer Group. Received: 08.31.2023 Accepted: 12.15.2023 Published: 12.31.2023 DOI: https://doi.org/10.26512/lc29202350573 Article