In this paper we explore the way mud, forest (bush), and play-dough create places of intensity and vitality for the children involved and we consider how these might relate to literacy and sustainability learning. We discuss the methodological challenges that have emerged from the initial phase of this research, a phase we have described as ‘deep hanging’ out. Deep hanging out refers to being/becoming-with children, aged 3 – 5 years, as they go about their everyday life in the early childhood centres they attend. Our deep hanging out is underpinned by ‘curious practice’ (Haraway, 2015) where we observe children without any particular purpose or assumptions and see what unfolds during this process, exploring the ways children name their worlds. Part of this involves methodological challenges related to exploring ways to observe children as we have come to recognize that children’s play is often most interesting when they are not aware of being watched. Sometimes this involves us becoming participant in ways that mean we are an unremarkable part of whatever is happening, other times it is about observing without appearing to observe and being aware of some children’s desires to escape surveillance. We discuss our current methods of recording data, which includes using iPhones to take photos, record short videos, and brief notes. These are developed into wonderings as fieldnotes as soon as possible after we leave the Centres. Finally, we offer some preliminary thoughts in response to ‘mud, forest, and play-dough’. In this we find that all of our concepts are under erasure including ourselves as researchers, and the core concepts of literacy and sustainability. Viewed from a posthuman lens considering literacy in relation to mud, water and play dough gives rise to extraordinary moments of neuroplasticity where objects, spaces and bodies are transformed from one moment to the next. There is nothing in the children’s actions and verbalization that resembles adult understandings of sustainability as vegie gardens, worm farms and nature. Bodies, materiality and imagination emerge as conceptual tools when we explore these moments through the logic of sense, affect and intensities (Deleuze, 1988; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004), imagination as concept formation (Fleer, 2011), new materialism (Barad, 2007) and vibrant matter (Bennett, 2010). Finally we consider what thinking literacy and sustainability together might mean in these early years settings through notions of aliveness, intensity, vitality and energy as it is manifested in different ways and different places.

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