This article will focus on early childhood education and pedagogy in the new millennium. The context is Sweden and Swedish preschool, where a change in the school law a few years ago also resulted in a revision of the preschool curriculum. "Teaching" is one of the new notions that has not previously been used in the preschool context. In this empirical article, we will look specifically at what happens in a teaching situation where the teacher has an intended object of learning and manages to involve all five children in an active dialogue about the mathematical notions of half and whole. From the analysis, we discern three features important in the teacher's use of a story as a basis for teaching children: (1) shared attention, (2) reasoning about meaning, and (3) creating a demarcated space for learning a specific content.