The development of social and emotional learning in children can directly impact overall learning, emotional skills, and socialization of young children (The Urban Child Institute, 2024). Equal emphasis on social and emotional learning should mirror the importance and impact of academic learning. A philosophy of integrated social and emotional…

The CLASS-PreK instrument is widely used to evaluate early childhood classrooms, but how classrooms using Montessori, the world's most common alternative education system, fare on CLASS is understudied. Because CLASS focuses largely on teacher-child interactions as the situs of learning, but in Montessori theory, child-environment interactions are…

Playgroups are a unique form of early childhood provision involving parents and their children attending together. Parents' attendance at playgroups provides opportunities for involvement in play. However, little is known about parents' practices of co-play in playgroups and the potential for these practices to enhance children's play experiences…

Japanese teachers consider clean-up time to be the group's responsibility, and they rely on the use of music and encouragement to make clean-up time an appealing activity. The children's positive feelings also may be partially explained by the fact that teachers consider clean-up time to be an extension of play, saving toys and activities for the…

This study explores how children construct their belonging in culturally diverse early childhood settings in Finland and Iceland. Belonging is understood as a holistic phenomenon that is constructed through various relations. The study is a multiple-case study, influenced by ethnographic approaches, conducted with children in two preschool…

This study aimed to determine preschool teacher candidates' ability to design Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)-focused activities and their attitudes towards STEM. The research method of the study was determined as a case study. The study was carried out with 35 preschool teacher candidates in the 3rd grade of the Preschool…

Children should engage in at least 60 min of physical activity daily to develop or maintain healthy habits (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021a). Previous research suggests that contingent attention is a powerful tool for increasing moderate to vigorous physical activity. In this study, the researchers examined the effects of a group…

Collaborations that lead to creative outputs occur within different group contexts and with diverse populations, including young children. Two cases of collaborative drawing are presented in this article to consider how young children engage in creative collaboration by negotiating meaning with others through open-ended group drawing. We…

A sense of belonging is essential for children in preschool. During the past decade, there has been a striking change in the orientation of the Swedish preschool environment. Now more child observations tend to focus on individual skills and assessment of ability to handle future schooling. A new discourse is clear; one that moves from a group…

A growing number of toddlers are attending childcare institutions as part of China's establishment of its infant-toddler childcare service system. However, there is limited empirical evidence available regarding the quality of these childcare services. The purpose of this study is to investigate the quality of teacher - child interactions in…

"Cooperative Games in Education" is the first comprehensive guide to the world of cooperative play and games for pre-K-12 learning. It includes a thorough pedagogical rationale and guidelines for practice, a survey of related research and scholarship, engaging anecdotes, illustrations, historical background, and an array of sample games…

Defining categories of musical actions in improvisation with young children is challenging due to the spontaneous, creative and emergent nature of interactions. Following a literature review, two new constructs were proposed to circumscribe and classify different types of events in improvisation, Creative Musical Agency (CMA) and Socio-Musical…

In this study, we examined how preschool students with language delays engaged in interactive dialogue during regular circle time and dramatic inquiry activities. Using frequency recording of three preschool students' linguistic engagement and multimodal analysis of classroom video data, this article explores how these students produced social,…

As an art specialist intern at a museum-based preschool, the author facilitated an art studio session every afternoon for 5-year-old students. She naively envisioned children creating artworks that followed her lesson plans and instructions. However, as she embarked on this journey and began teaching these sessions, she witnessed two startling…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effects of cooperative physical activities on social interactions of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in China. Cooperative physical activities include procedures such as peer selection, peer practice, group task completion, and an interdependent group contingency. The intervention took…