Early childhood education settings provide opportunities for children to learn what it means to be social and consequently, what it means to be a friend. Friendship-making is multifaceted among peers of similar ages and perhaps even more complex between children with a significant age discrepancy. Mixed-age settings, where children socialise within a large age range, offer a rich context to explore the concept of 'friendship' between older children and their (much) younger peers. This paper investigates how children explore the 'doing of making friends' by analysing how children initiate connection, how they recognise social cues, and how they respond. The paper reports on data taken from a study investigating children's participation rights in an early childhood education setting in Australia. Taken from 75 h of video-recordings, selected extracts of interactions between a child of 5-years with different aged younger peers were analysed using a fine-grained analysis of conversation analysis. The findings provide insights into the complexity of children's relationships while also underscoring the critical role educators play in scaffolding connections between young children of different ages.