Childhood and schooling are the focus of this thesis that lies in the field of education, with dialogue with philosophy, sociology and politics. In order to investigate the experience of childhood in institutions, relies, in the studies of philosophy, especially in the work of Walter Benjamin and his concept of childhood and experience; in the sociology of childhood, marked by recognition of children as social construction, component of culture/society, structural form that does not disappear, and children, actors, and producers of social processes; and in the analysis of the political context surrounding the practices of institutionalization of children, taking as inspiration the analytical benchmarks proposed by Ball and Mainardes (2001, 2006, 2011). The empirical field was built from the database concerning observation in twenty and one early childhood institutions of the city of Rio de Janeiro during the period from 2005 to 2008. The examination of the material comprised a double movement. The first was the panoramic analysis of the data showed that regardless of the format of institutionalization of children (if attending daycare centers, preschools or preschool classes in elementary schools) childhood experience takes place in the encounter between the individual and collective processes resulting from the children s relationships with their peers, with adults, with objects, with the culture/history, with society and with nature. Can be perceived through the observation of their appropriations forms, reproductions and reinvention of the world, as well as their own modes of interpreting it and relate to each other, through the creation of rules, norms and expectations that lead not only to personal actions, as the context in which they are inserted, by means of the circulation that occurs in pairs. The second movement , had new approach, in which it sought another perspective of reading and ownership of the data. In it, the goal was the framing of situations involving children and adults in a specific educational service mode, the selected context was the exclusive preschools. As a conclusion is that the childhood experience of children of preschools observed materializes (1) in the construction of the identity of being a child, that takes place in dialogue with what they regard as being an adult. (2) in learning the craft of the student (3) and in the challenge of belonging to a group, the inclusion of belonging children a public, shared space, where will their cultures of pairs.