This research examines the relationship over time between children’s (aged 3-5) free play cultures and practices at home and in the nursery. Research questions concern how this relationship was perceived and responded to from multiple perspectives; how these relationships, perceptions, and responses developed over time; and how children’s research experiences impacted their free play. In these six months of qualitative research, eighteen children from two state-maintained Nurseries in London used free play provision in the nursery as a participatory tool. Questionnaires and indepth interviews were conducted with parents and practitioners. The study makes the following methodological contributions to the field of conducting research with children. It offers free play as a participatory tool for children to communicate their perspectives and experiences by engaging in free play. The originality lies in the study’s introduction of the researcher to the children, as a learner from a school for adults who studied children’s play. It extends the use of participatory research beyond collecting children’s artefacts and narratives and includes an examination of children’s experiences of conducting research. The study’s conceptual framework contributes to the field of conducting research with children in the following ways. It extends ideas related to ‘agency’; and combines it with Bourdieu’s ‘field’ to conceptualise children’s free play and research experiences that are relationally, contextually and temporally dynamic; and are assigned multiple meanings from adult and child perspectives. Findings showed individuality in children’s free play that revealed the dialogic relationship between cultures and practices at home and in the nursery. Developments in play themes, language, play behaviour, and children’s agency exercised during free play over time, showed the complex and dynamic two-way traffic of cultures and practices between home and the nursery. The study revealed the development of unique relationships between children’s research experiences that included researcher-child relationships and their free play in the nursery
