The paper draws on ethnographic data on children's game-playing in Khwezi Park outside Cape Town. This unsupervised, child-choreographed play is seen as a site of meaning-making and identity work where children draw on a range of resources and influences to take and make meaning. These resources for semiosis and interaction are multilingual and multi-modal, and are sourced from social domains that are local, regional and global. This site of play is shown to be itself a distinctive domain where these children can mediate and model for each other the semiotics, practices and resources of school, local and popular culture, religion, mass media and home. These resources allow them to experiment as meaning-makers and sign-makers under conditions of peer feedback in a situated context where there is both contained specificity and freedom to innovate. Such sustained peer-play is seen to be a resource for this particular group of children, encouraging them to be inventive and reflexive in developing their sign-making potentials. The children's social semiotic activity is seen as productive of meanings that are seen as both hybrid in their sources, domain-specific and linked to the children's performances in other contexts, particularly that of school-based reading and writing.