Purpose: Preserving and caring for nature in a sustainable way has long been part of Swedish preschool practice. However, recently has it been explicitly referenced in the Swedish preschool curriculum with the goal of incorporating sustainability holistically and coherently in all areas of children's daily preschool experiences through play, care,…

Children develop their language when they explore and talk about literary texts. In this study, we explore the design of shared digital reading as a basis for critical reflection on the reading situation in an institutional context with its given opportunities and limitations. We examine six videotaped readings of one specific picture book app,…

Teachers of year 0/1 students in English-medium schools in New Zealand (1896 schools) were invited to participate in a survey focussed on assessment of new entrant children's oral language and emergent literacy skills, with an estimated 21% response rate (N = 745). Teachers indicated using a variety of methods for assessing children's skills at…

Math is increasingly recognized as a critical part of what young children are exposed to and learn in early childhood programs. Geometry is one of three focal areas emphasized for early childhood, and opportunities for geometry learning are present in many manipulatives present in early childhood classrooms. Yet geometry remains an understudied…

Globally competent people are aware of world issues, take perspective, are engaged and know how to communicate to different people. This article portraits a story of two kindergarten classrooms, one in the United States and the other in Greece, both working with culturally diverse children and, in the case of the American classroom, English…

Person-centered therapy (PCT) comes from the experiential and relationship-oriented therapy tradition. It is considered to be a third force in therapeutic engagement, along with the psychoanalytic and behavioral approaches. PCT is based on faith in and empowerment of human beings to be joyful, creative, self-fulfilled and willing and able to…

This research aimed to investigate the use of picture books by preschool teachers to instruct environmental concepts and their influence on resource saving by children. The study adopted qualitative research as a method to investigate 11 children aged 5-6 years in Taiwan. In addition, we used "the environmental protector" as a main…

We seem to have a problem in arts education at pre-school level: the lack of specific training for teachers teaching this subject to very young children. The future preschool teachers' training seems to be focused on the teaching and learning aspects of artistic education however they receive little training on methodologies and philosophies.…

Early literacy is often over-simplified as a set of skills for beginning reading, an approach which overlooks the ways that children play their way into cultures, using play as a literacy that accesses popular media as rich literary repertoires of characters and storylines. This article examines how children's play reveals their participatory…

This paper examines how early childhood policy initiatives in the United Kingdom and internationally currently reflect neoliberal concerns with school readiness in the development of human capital and what diverse theoretical perspectives might offer. The focus is a project involving a group of early childhood academics from one university and a…

Researchers from different disciplines (e.g., physiological, psychological, philosophical) have investigated motivation using multiple approaches. For example, in physiology (the scientific study of the normal function in living systems such as biology), researchers may use "electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain, the recording of…

This study examined whether children's observed individual engagement with teachers, peers, and tasks related to their school readiness after controlling for observed preschool classroom quality and children's baseline skills. The sample included 211 predominately low-income, racially/ethnically diverse 4-year-old children in 49 preschool…

University-based teacher education programs are criticized for being too theoretical, disconnected from the everyday realities of schools. To bridge this gap, teacher education programs give students year-long field experiences under the joint tutelage of mentor teachers and university faculty. However, this assumes that mentor teachers will not…

Even very young children think about their own and others' behavior, including emotions. Such cognitions and emotions about the self and others convey information that is crucial to social interactions and relationships. The current study based on an integrated model of emotion processes and cognition in social information processing (SIP) aimed…

Pre-school education, which ordinarily is supposed to be the foundation stone of our education system, is wholly left in the hands of private operators to manage with no supervisory authority over them, a situation that has led to poor standards and quality. It was emphasised that if pre-school education is to serve its stated purposes of making…