"I think I can, I think I can' puffed "The Little Engine That Could." The American folktale taught the value of optimism and hard work reflecting a growth mindset belief about abilities. A growth mindset positively impacts academic achievement, motivation, and children's agency for learning. Few studies have explored how early…

Integral to the global nature play movement, nature play programs have flourished over the last decade, both in Australia and internationally. Internationally, there are two prominent schools of thought in this movement, Danish Nature Kindergartens, and British Forest Schools. The underpinning philosophy of Danish Nature Kindergarten programs has…

The importance of children experiencing a successful transition to school is well established in research literature. Central to this is including the children themselves in the conversation about their learning and ensuring they develop a sense of fit and belonging to their new school environment. The findings shared in this paper sit within a…

Research has consistently established the positive impact of sharing books with young children. Evidence suggests several important factors when evaluating book sharing with young children, including the quality of educator practice = and the nature of groupings, as well as the frequency and duration of book sharing sessions and access to books.…

Write Start is a co-taught, whole of class approach to handwriting instruction developed for students in grade one and delivered collaboratively by teachers and occupational therapists. Write Start emphasizes the development of handwriting fluency utilizing evidence-based cognitive and perceptual motor strategies within a station-based teaching…

Effective parent-teacher partnerships improve outcomes for autistic students. Yet, we know little about what effective partnerships look like for parents of autistic children from different backgrounds. We conducted interviews with 17 Chinese parents of autistic children attending Australian kindergartens/schools to understand their experiences.…

Researchers of early childhood educators' practice have noted the usefulness of applying various conceptual and methodological resources to create accounts of complexity. This article contributes to an under-researched area, providing evidence of multi-tasking and task rotation as aspects of the complexity of early childhood educators' practice.…

Studies into early mathematics education have reported that play, and active exploration, provide promising settings for early mathematics education (Ginsburg, 2006) as the early years is a time to engage children in a range of mathematical ideas to develop their mathematical capability (MacDonald, 2018). More recently, the Australian Association…

We used latent profile analysis to identify major behavioral self-regulation profiles among children who were assessed as developmentally vulnerable in terms of hyperactivity and inattention. We examined three domains of behavioral regulation: (a) cognitive--behavioral regulation by way of learning behaviors; (b) social-behavioral regulation by…

Gender-based violence (GBV) is a global health issue that affects significant proportions of women and girls. Despite research showing that children understand and perform stereotypical gender norms from as young as 3 years, addressing gender with young children is controversial. Programs that aim to teach gender fairness and respectful…

Purpose: Children learning to read in English must learn to read words with varying degrees of grapheme-phoneme correspondence regularity, but there is very little research comparing methods of instruction for words with less predictable or irregular spellings. Therefore, we compared three methods of instruction for beginning readers. Method:…

The role of early childhood education and care (ECEC) is to support the learning and development of children in collaboration with families. The notion of inclusion in ECEC provides children with a sense of agency in becoming a learner able to participate fully and actively in their community. This paper illustrates how ECEC assessment approaches…

Young children's engagement in Education for Sustainability has focussed predominantly on their participation in environment-based initiatives or practices. Reasons for this include a notion that wider dimensions of sustainability, including social, political and economic areas of concern can be too complex and overwhelming for young children.…

Early childhood is an important time for building children's affinity with nature and the environment. Early childhood professionals play a crucial role in developing young children's understanding of the natural world. Over the past 50 years, there has been a movement in early childhood education and care contexts to provide young children with…

The ultimate goal of reading is to comprehend written text, and this goal can only be attained if the reader can decode written words and understand their meanings. The science of reading has provided compelling evidence for the subskills that form the foundation of decoding. Decoding words requires understanding of the alphabetic principle and…