Engaging students in their learning depends on the teachers' pedagogical practices. The first author is a STEAM scholar and preschool educator who realized engagement is necessary for meaningful learning. For this, teachers and students must have exposure to innovative and arts-integrated pedagogy (e.g., storytelling). However, the teachers in the…

Play allows children to experience joy in the moment of learning. Parrott and Cohen (2020) highlight the benefit of unstructured play to children's overall learning in their case study. Outdoor play typically has no restrictions or end goal in mind. The possibilities of outdoor learning experiences are endless for children as they experiment with…

Early childhood education provides an important arena for fostering valuable habits and practices for sustainability. This paper contributes to understanding the educator's role within early childhood environmental education in foraging and gardening practices. What pedagogical approaches does the teacher provide to foster the children's…

This article describes a teacher in Vietnam being trained in and using process-oriented child monitoring (POM) in their classroom. POM is a child observation approach that can be used to determine students' levels of wellbeing and involvement in the classroom, which helps a teacher understand if deep-level learning is taking place. POM is an easy,…

This paper gathers 14 ethnographic studies in a meta-ethnographic research to generate knowledge on the possibilities of creative teaching practices with digital media from an ethnographic perspective to promote inclusive education in schools. It explores common details between the articles using cross-case aggregation, which allows to get to know…

This paper presents a teaching scenario designed to introduce preschool children to electricity, structured around the 5E instructional model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate). The study involves 18 children from an urban kindergarten with diverse backgrounds and learning needs. Over four weeks, children engage in interactive…

Student engagement is one of the most promising concepts in educational research today, as it has been positively correlated to a host of desirable outcomes and negatively correlated to a variety of undesirable outcomes. While there has been tremendous progress in advancing our understanding of student engagement including the developing of…

Early childhood care and education providers provide instruction to diverse learners, including children with developmental delays, but often lack training in the use of evidence-based instructional strategies to support children's meaningful learning engagement. This preliminary study examined effects of the Early Achievements for Child Care…

Despite numerous research findings that support play's positive impact on children's learning, pressure to pass high-stakes tests later in the elementary years has prompted a decrease in the amount of time for kindergarten play. While play proponents work to prioritize play in kindergarten, there is a dilemma. How can educators respond to the…

Indonesia is committed to creating an inclusive education system. Kindergartens have a key role to play in this endeavour. However, there are specific challenges that need to be addressed if this potential is to be fulfilled. It has been suggested that the use of keyword signs within Sign Supported Big Books (SSBB) as part of everyday story time…

This study presents the research that Pramling Samuelsson's keynote at the 32nd annual EECERA conference in Brighton 2024 drew upon. The study addresses an important but understudied feature of early childhood education and care for sustainability (ECECfS), namely engaging children in prospective or what-if thinking. Our reasoning is founded on…

Due to the increased use of technology in people's lives, digital media literacy has become increasingly more important in young children's early experiences. When used appropriately, children discover how to use digital media in ways that enhance their learning, preparing them for the positive benefits of technology use across their lifetime. The…

Many early childhood educators use the evidenced-based practice of interactive shared book reading (ISBR) to promote the development of important communication and literacy skills. ISBR for preschoolers has been shown to build both vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, which in turn contributes to later language and reading comprehension…

While recent reform-based efforts have shifted the emphasis towards engaging children in science practices, little research has considered how preschool-age children take first steps towards engagement in evidence-based explanations or modelling practices nor the role museum-settings might provide. Using a theoretical perspective that science…

Preschoolers are fascinated with dinosaurs, and they often have a wealth of knowledge about numerous dinosaur species. The authors capitalized on this interest by creating a three-dimensional 5E lesson (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate; Bybee 2014) to introduce them to the science practice of modeling. Models are important as tools of…