This paper is based on my forthcoming doctoral thesis about pre-school teachers work with children’s participation. The aim of my thesis is to describe and analyze how teachers, in pre-schools which put focus on children’s participation, work with giving children opportunities to influence the pedagogical environment and activities. I also want to discuss what the children express about their possibilities for participation, and the relation between the possibilities for participation for the individual child and for the group of children. (The children in my study are between 1 and 5 years old.) My tentative research questions are: 1) What do the pre-school teachers put into the concept participation? 2) How do the pre-school teachers describe their work with children’s participation? 3) In which situations, and in which ways, do the pre-school teachers create possibilities for children’s participation? In this paper, I describe the theoretical and methodological background of my forthcoming thesis. I also begin to answer the first and the second question from the list above, with empiric data from interviews with the teachers in my study. In doing this, I raise questions that are important for the continuing work on my thesis.