A day-care centre is a place where a child spends most of his/her week nowadays. A day-care centre as an institution of early childhood education has often been studied from the early childhood educators' point of view or within a wider societal context. The children's voices have not been heard much. The purpose of this article is to describe, on…

This paper is based on qualitative research data from a project investigating early childhood boys' constructions of masculinities in relation to sport, health and the body. The focus group data, with 33 boys, has been collected in each of the boys' first three years at school. It is part of the data that will be collected over eight years with…

From a sociocultural approach to literacy, young children, including culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children, can be viewed as active meaning-makers through participation in everyday literacy practices. This theoretical emphasis on the importance of the social context requires teachers and caregivers not only to improve and co-create…

In this paper, the findings of a study investigating four-year-old children's perspectives on the roles that male and female teachers fulfil in a kindergarten setting are presented. The purpose of this study was to discover if the gender of a teacher impacts on children's perspectives of their teachers' roles and whether boys' and girls'…

Open and public discussion of death, particularly among children, remains one of the greatest Japanese societal taboos; therefore, little is known about Japanese children's perceptions of death. To explore Japanese children's notions of life and death, 16 healthy children (7 girls and 9 boys, mean age 8.9) were each interviewed 3 times and asked…

Twenty-two 5- and 6-year-old children and their parents in one playschool in Reykjavik participated in this study designed to shed light on children's and parents' views about their early childhood program. Group interviews, children's photographs, children's drawings, and a questionnaire administered as a game were used to elicit children's…

The study was conducted with a group of 5 and 6 year old children in one playschool in Reykjavik, Iceland. The purpose of the study was to shed light on what life in an Icelandic playschool is like for the children attending the program, finding out their views on why they attend playschool, what they do and learn in playschool, what the adults do…