Socio-dramatic play is an everyday occurrence in early childhood education as children create narratives together in shared imagined worlds. The teacher's role in this type of play is less clear and this paper draws on a study using Lindqvist's "playworlds" approach to gain insight into how teachers participate in children's play. In…

There is currently a debate as to whether academic content at kindergarten crowds out time spent in creative arts, free play, and physical activity. Analyzing kindergarten teachers' reports of their instruction from the ECLS-K:2011, this study examined whether core academic content or advanced academic content in math or English language arts…

When first released in 2009, the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) recognised intentional teaching as one of its eight core practices (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) (2009). In 2022, the EYLF was revised to include a broader understanding of 'intentionality', encompassing both the educator and the child…

This article explores children's self-initiated outdoor play and holistic learning in a Norwegian kindergarten. While children's self-initiated play is valued in Nordic ECEC, it is rarely analyzed in relation to holistic learning. To explore how children's self-initiated outdoor play contributes to children's holistic learning in ECEC, we observed…

Young children encounter uncertainty and challenges on a daily basis; through their intuitions, experiences and experimentation they construct knowledge, skills and dispositions towards probabilistic concepts. The aim of this exploratory ethnographic study is to identify how young children engage with probabilistic thinking and reasoning while…

This paper explores children's understandings of Acknowledgement to Country practices and Aboriginal knowledges. Guided by the relational lenses of respect, responsibility and reciprocity, we conducted focus groups with children across five Australian early education centres. We found that Acknowledgement practices were evident through recitation…

Playing is an activity that affects significantly the psychological development and learning in preschool age. Opinions among researchers and practitioners are divided about adults' role in children's play. Despite being a children's activity, high-level, complex social play hardly appears without adult mediation. According to the narrative play…

The article seeks to develop a better understanding of the contribution of materiality in a discourse between a creator (content producer) and an interface, dealing with analogue and digital artefacts. Focus is in the materiality of the two different art-creation learning processes, acrylic painting and digital painting. The objective of this…

The objectives of the research were to investigate a creative learning promotion activity package for 30 Thai seven-year-old, first-grade school students. Secondly, to design a creative learning promotion activity package, followed by an assessment of the creative learning development process from a series of creative learning promotion…

The present study explored pre-primary students' investigative activity during a longitudinal, integrative technology education project: the Power Creatures project. Investigative activity refers to the way young children act in a learning context that combines inquiry-based activities with creative hands-on activities, such as designing and…

This article aims to use the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) framework to analyse the participation of an early childhood teacher in children's creative play, in order to enhance and support creativity. The study is grounded on Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, and highlights teacher's play involvement and the arts as a cultural…

Access to play has been recognized as a universal right of children (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 31) and promoted by international and national organizations with a focus on children's well-being, such as Childhood Education International, the International Play Association, the US Play Coalition, and the Alliance for…

Although early childhood caregivers in South African townships integrate singing into their teaching on a daily basis, they are often unaware of how to facilitate other musical interactions through movement, playing instruments or body percussion. The 'Bejazzled' action research project was initiated to facilitate these interactions through…

The Vygotskian preschool education program (VPEP) is built around mediation in the context of preschool age-specific activities such as sociodramatic play, constructive play, listening and retelling fairy tales, playing with dollhouses, motor activities, and some others. We used the VPEP as part of the daily curriculum in two pre-K classes at PS…

Pretence and creativity are often regarded as ubiquitous characteristics of childhood, yet not all education systems value or promote these attributes to the same extent. Different pedagogies and practices are evident within the UK National Curriculum, Steiner and Montessori schools. In this study, 20 children participated from each of these…