Taking objects apart including old electronics, product packing, and living plants, helps children understand how things work. Documenting this "unbuilding" or "deconstructing" encourages children to first consider the entire object, then the parts, and finally, the purpose of the parts. This article provides a lesson based on…

Policy agendas for early childhood education in the UK as in many countries elsewhere are driven by expectations that play will impact positively on a child's educational attainment, health and well-being. This paper focuses on health knowledge, social class and cultural reproduction within early year education in England, looking specifically at…

The purpose of the present study was to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of simultaneous prompting with and without video modeling in teaching food preparation skills to four participants with autism spectrum disorder, whose ages ranged from 5 to 6 years old. An adapted alternating treatment single-case experimental design was used to…

Community garden activities can play a significant role in bridging formal and informal learning, particularly in urban children's science and environmental education. It promotes relational methods of learning, discussing, and practicing that will integrate food security, social interactions, community development, environmental activism, and…

For practitioners in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) in English schools (ages 3-5), the ethos of learning by "investigating and doing" is a major component of the pleasure of teaching very young children. The "Knowledge and understanding of the world" area of the EYFS (where scientific learning is mainly anchored)…

Printed materials have been used extensively as an educational tool to increase food safety awareness. Few educational materials have been designed to target families with young children for food safety education. This article reports the use of the formative evaluation process to develop a brochure designed to enhance awareness about food safety…

Objective: The objective of this study was to determine knowledge of food hygiene amongst young children (5-7 years), and facilitators and barriers to application of knowledge. Few studies exist that explore the knowledge and attitudes of young children towards food hygiene. This is an important age group, as it is a time when attitudes and…

A multiple-probe design across response chains and students was used to evaluate the combined instructional effects of progressive time delay, general case training, and observational learning on the food and drink preparation skills of three children with autism. All instruction was delivered in a group learning arrangement. The data suggested…

A class of 3- to 5-year-old children in a midwestern child care center chose to study pizza restaurants as a group project. This article discusses how the project evolved, describes the three phases of the project, and provides the teachers' reflections on the project. Photos taken during the project and children's sketches are included. (Contains…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine why the uptake of free milk in a particular nursery class was low, to explore the meanings children attribute to drinks given to them in school and those brought from home, and make suggestions as to what might be done to improve children's intake of free school milk. Design/methodology/approach:…

This paper describes teacher responses to a framework designed to support teacher planning for technology. It includes a learning experience outside the classroom [LEOTC] and is designed specifically for five-year-old students. The planning framework draws together characteristics of technology education, junior primary classrooms and LEOTC to…

The preschool years are a critical period for the development of food preferences and lifelong eating habits. Between the ages of 2 and 5, children become increasingly responsive to external cues, such as television commercials that use popular cartoon characters to advertise foods, candy in supermarket checkout aisles, and fast-food restaurants…