A two-year ethnographic study of kindergarteners' experiences in a French immersion classroom focused on the processes by which children find and construct meaning through classroom interaction and communication processes. Data were gathered through classroom observation and videotapes. The initially unilingual English-speaking students were observed frequently during their kindergarten year and intermittently in first grade. Individual and group sense-making strategies observed include: attending to meaning; negotiation of meaning; relying on translation or mediation of meaning; participation, modeling, and imitation; anticipating routine sequence and patterns of interaction; using the filter of past experience; comparing first and second languages; good guessing or approximation; random guessing; sizing up people and context; attending to paralinguistic features in communication; relying on the reciprocity of communication; attending to meaning-context or meaning structures of the situation; and asking questions. Other findings include: the interaction and overlapping of teacher-talk and student-talk is important; there was a scarcity of natural, child-initiated communication during teacher-directed activities; and the central process for kindergarten students appears to be adapting to the demands of school life, with language-learning a secondary process. (MSE)