“…Research on children's free play makes many claims to its benefits in the domains of development (cognitive/metacognitive, physical/embodied, social/relational and affective) and specific benefits in areas of learning such as literacy (Brooker, Blaise & Edwards, 2014;Stagg-Peterson & Friedrich, 2022) and mathematics (Worthington & van Oers, 2016). Research on children's peer cultures has noted the significance of play for social affiliation and co-operation (Chesworth, 2019), for sharing multimodal, cultural and linguistic repertoires (Rogoff, Correa-Chávez & Dexter, 2015;Tatham-Fashanu, 2021), for building relationships with peers and adults and taking up powerful social roles (Stagg-Peterson, Young Jang & Tjandra, 2020). Children can be actively involved in co-creating their own developmental environments, where they are able to express their agency, identities, interests, heritages, languages and cultural practices.…”