This article uses the concept of literacy-as-event to explore the embodied meaning-making of a young child during small world play. Recent developments in literacy research, influenced by relational thinking, have led to a reconsideration of how meaning-making unfolds in home and school settings. The concept of literacy-as-event suggests that…

The exploration and/or manipulation of objects and materials, referred to as object-oriented play (OOP), is one of the most prominent activities children engage in during early childhood. Especially within early childhood education, it is important to be able to assess and understand OOP, its developmental trajectory, and developmental value. This…

Repetition is a salient strategy used by human and non-human cohorts for learning and controlling behavior. It this research project, a case study was conducted to explore deliberate voluntary repetition in younger cohorts during their spontaneous solitary play with single or multiple objects. Two main types of repetition -- blocked and random --…

The current study is the first to examine the role of exploration in play milestones development using a multi-measure micro-analytic approach. Fifteen infants, between the ages of 8 and 17 months, were observed in their natural home environment once a month for a one--hour session; their spontaneous mouthing and fingering and their play level…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

Teacher education and social education are increasingly challenged to adopt student-centred approaches by focusing on learning spaces and materiality. This study reports on an integrative literature review to determine how space and materiality are approached in the research literature on playful learning in higher education. A thematic analysis…

The present research studied children in the second year of life (N = 29, M[subscript age] = 21.14 months, SD = 2.64 months) using experimental manipulations within and between subjects to show that responsive parental influence helps children have more frequent sustained object holds with fewer switches between objects compared to when parents…

Object exploration is considered a driver of motor, cognitive, and social development. However, little is known about how early childhood education and care settings facilitate object exploration. This study examined if children's exploration of objects during free play was facilitated by the use of particular spatial components (floor, tables,…

Early object name learning is often conceptualized as a problem of mapping heard names to referents. However, infants do not hear object names as discrete events but rather in extended interactions organized around goal-directed actions on objects. The present study examined the statistical structure of the "nonlinguistic" events that…

Infants build knowledge by acting on the world. We conducted an ecologically grounded test of an embodied learning hypothesis: that infants' active engagement with objects in the home environment elicits caregiver naming and cascades to learning object names. Our home-based study extends laboratory-based theories to identify real-world processes…

"Research Findings:" Promoting children's science knowledge by adequate measures such as guided or free play is a cardinal goal of preschool. However, there is considerable variability in preschool teachers' instructional quality in block play, which might be associated with children's domain-specific science skills but also their…

Learning to walk leads to an increase in language abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms accounting for this relation remain unclear. Investigating the quality of early gait control may offer some insights. The purpose of this study was to: (1) quantify how 13-month-olds (n = 39; 39% male) and 24-month-olds (n = 39; 59% male) adapt gait…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

In early childhood, young children frequently engage in object-oriented play. According to cultural-historical activity theory, object-oriented play provides children with opportunities to learn about the characteristics and cultural applications of objects and materials. These characteristics are referred to as rules or affordances of objects and…

The present study explores the constructs of Chinese mothers' and fathers' engagement in toddlers' play in the daily context. A sample of 238 parents of toddlers (M = 30.43 months, SD = 3.45) completed a newly-developed instrument, the Chinese Parental Involvement in Toddler Play Activity Questionnaire (CPITPAQ), to report their play engagement.…