This study examined the literacy practices of children ages 5-11 as they engaged in out-of-school use of virtual worlds. The purpose of the study was to explore the nature, purpose, and role of literacy in children's use of a virtual world. In this article, I reflect on how children's use of literacy practices in the virtual world constructed and maintained an online social order. One hundred seventy-five children in an English primary school completed an online survey from which their use of virtual worlds was examined. Individual and group interviews were then conducted with 26 children across the year. The interviews established that children used the virtual worlds to extend contact with peers they had regular interaction with in the offline world. Further, three 11-year-old children were filmed at home as they used the virtual world Club Penguin. Additional interviews were conducted with the three children and their parents. Data analysis focused on the ways in which children drew on specific literacy practices to construct and maintain an interaction order. A key finding is that literacy operates as a means of developing online social cohesion, but the literacy practices that serve this function are located within the social, material, and cultural structures in which the children operate in the offline world and thus cannot be viewed in isolation from these wider discourses. (Contains 1 note, 5 tables, and 1 figure.)