Based on a corpus constructed using the ethnographic method, this description aims to portray preschool education as the place and time where the child becomes a student, with narrative semiotics providing an appropriate tool for analyzing this transformation.

The child enrolled in nursery school must go through a series of challenges and confrontations with difficulties to appropriate the objects and school culture that will make them a student. This process involves back-and-forth progress, with advances and setbacks, as the child does not become a student through a straightforward path; it will thus be shown that in nursery school, the identities of student and child coexist.

At the same time, parents must undergo a process that enables them to behave as parents of students. To do this, they must also face several challenges: the main one is accepting the separation; then, parents must learn about school expectations and support the child's schooling.

It is based on these three skills—knowing how to enroll the child in school, knowing how to seek information, and knowing how to support the child's schooling—that parents are recognized as "parents of students."