Examine play as an opportunity for literacy activity in children's early years. We use the word opportunity in the active sense to refer both to the availability of play in children's lives and to how settings are organized structurally and normatively to press for literacy activity in play. To begin we briefly overview literacy–play connections in 2 domains: (1) the psychological, which focuses on relationships between pretense and literacy-related discourse that occur in play texts, and (2) the ecological, which explores the forces of environmental that press on children's literacy behavior in the play context. Teasing out the practical implications of this work, we describe how it might be applied to the creation of literacy-enriched play opportunities for young children, particularly in educational settings. In closing we point to possibilities for further research that may enlarge our understanding of play's literacy potential, but we also highlight issues that surround the literacy-in-play line of inquiry that require thoughtful consideration by scholars and educators alike.