This article outlines ways in which video can further our understanding of how different modes of communication and meaning-making shape learning and learners in the early years. It focuses on a dramatic play and writing episode videoed during a three-year action research study investigating children's use of different semiotic modes in the curriculum of a New Zealand kindergarten. It highlights the capacity of video to enable closer attention to be paid to the pedagogical significance of modes such as the visual, gestural, mimetic, spatial and kinaesthetic as well as the verbal. It explores how differences in media (e.g. computer, video, book, screen) interact with differences in mode, and the ways in which the collaborative viewing of video recordings of "everyday" episodes in early childhood settings, by teachers, researchers and parents, can serve as a platform for inquiry about children's meaning-making processes. (Contains 9 figures.)