This article presents a study in which the author researched her own practice as the teacher of a reception class in a large primary school in England. The research focussed on the challenge of articulating what was tacitly or intuitively known: how, and why, the myriad of choices and decisions of which teaching is constituted could be made and justified. The author considers the significance of the class as a community; the relationship between everybody and children as individuals. A consistent and coherent principled stance was identified, articulated in terms of attention to imagination. The article discusses the significance of this as the means by which the individuality of everybody could be perceived.