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In this article, the first part of the research project ‘Musical interaction in preschool’ will be presented and analysed. The purpose of the study was to examine which musical interactive activities are expressed in everyday pre-school environments, and how these types of interaction can be related to children’s development and learning. Through observations of planned lessons and children’s free play in different milieus, the interactions have been mapped. Using Merleau-Ponty’s lifeworld phenomenology, varied interactions reflect embodied education patterns as a part of pre-school cultural canonization. The result shows that the children in the study have a good ability to interact musically but that this resource is less utilized in the planned music teaching. The analyses were based on learning strategies in music with a child-first perspective which links back to lifeworld phenomenological perspectives of meaning.