This paper reflects on a slow-motion video clip of the hands of three young children as they play with toys in the sand tray. It foregrounds sand and toys that are handled, as well as hands that grasp and relinquish things. Through this movement of hands that tug and pull at things, it explores how things animate bodies, and how this produces the…

Toddlers learn more about the world from picture books with photographs instead of drawings, but commercial books often have tactile features such as flaps that may counterintuitively hinder learning. This study tested how lift-the-flap features in a commercial picture book of first words affected 2-year-olds' (N = 32) learning of a new word for…

Education involves the engagement of the full range of the senses in the accomplishment of tasks and the learning of knowledge and skills. However both in pedagogical practices and in the process of educational research, there has been a tendency to privilege the visual. To explore these issues, detailed sensory ethnographic fieldwork was…