Although recognising multiple creativities as an interdisciplinary and contemporary approach to creativity represents the basic opportunity for future change, the assessment of children's musical creativity is a problematic and insufficiently explored area. The paper discusses the problem of encouraging and assessing the creative musical potential…

Pretend play provides enriched environments for multiple cognitive and social purposes. The quality of children's pretend play depends on the process, including children's back and forth proposals and responses about the play frames. Proposing and responding to play ideas with metacommunication use, leadership-followership interactions are…

The use of natural and non-natural play materials in early childhood education is a critical facilitator to children's learning and development. Different materials vary in their affordances for sophisticated play, imagination, and creativity, which contribute to children's complex thinking; with the current focus on technology, it has been…

The purpose of this study is to explore a theoretical idea in relation to a body of empirical material from a reading activity involving a picturebook on shadow. The theoretical idea, sprung from variation theory, entails children's discernment through synchronic simultaneity as a key to their ability to imagine. To explore this idea, an analysis…

In order to create and foster learning spaces that build upon children's knowledge and experiences, we must respect and value their ways of knowing and being, including their play. Accordingly, this study highlights the ways that young children (re)imagined spaces, materials, and identities through their digital play in an analog (containing no…

The author draws on Lev S. Vygotsky's conception of play and Gunilla Lindqvist's methodology concerning the aesthetics of play to discuss play practice in early childhood classrooms. Based on the study of an educational experiment at a primary school, she discusses how children in a school setting simultaneously engage in developed forms of…

Play has long been understood as an important pedagogical practice, particularly in early childhood education and care settings. Playing with food, however, has typically been overlooked, and very little is known about food play during mealtimes. The apparent dichotomy between rule-following and playfulness at mealtimes has led to a paucity of…

As a three-year-old, Margaret Katch told stories about princesses in Vivian Paley's classroom. Now deep into adulthood, she reflects on how acting out these stories as a preschooler influenced her life.

This study aims to bridge a gap between Vygotsky's seminal framework on the importance of make-believe play and adult scaffolding in children's cognitive development (e.g. executive function [EFs]) and research in cognitive neuroscience. Kindergarten children (N = 160) and teachers (N = 12) took part in the study. EFs skills and make-believe play…

The article aims to study the influence of music and music-calligraphy practice on the development of creative thinking among preschool children. The study used the general screening model of the Torrance Thinking Creatively in Action and Movement test (TCAMt) to assess the level of motor creativity in children. The study participants were 120 4-5…

Play acts as the source of children's development in the preschool period. Yet, the global pandemic has changed children's play conditions in ways that are not yet fully understood. With movement restrictions, families have struggled to find ways of bringing children together for play. We studied how family day care (FDC) educators across a remote…

In Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC), pedagogues traditionally work in a child-centred manner, valuing the children's experiences. During the last 150 years pedagogues have developed expertise in framing everyday life for children while paying double attention to the children's perspectives, on one hand, and to their own pedagogical…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the direct and indirect relationships between autism traits and listening comprehension among Chinese preschool children with autism, of varying verbal and non-verbal IQ. Ninety-eight (N = 98) children aged from 35 to 86 months participated in the study. Autism traits were measured with the…

It has been suggested that children's drawings are associated with their representation ability. However, there is little research on the cognitive basis of drawing in young children. In this study, we investigated the relationship between drawing, language ability, and the presence of imaginary companions (ICs) in children aged between three and…

Do young children understand the complex mathematics in the petals of a daisy, the Fibonacci sequence in the spiral of a pinecone, the fractal geometry in the leaves of a fern, or the "golden ratio" in the seed pattern of a sunflower? Probably not, but they certainly can observe and recognize the patterns and compare them to similar…