Our youngest learners thrive when their learning environment is one that celebrates curiosity, exploration, and imagination. This comprehensive resource sets the stage for play-based learning that will help children build a strong literacy foundation as well as negotiate the choices they make in real life. Get your students off on the right foot…

Exercise times can enhance a variety of child learning goals and especially help some children with attention span difficulties to concentrate better on class lessons. Specific ways for teachers to create exercise sessions are suggested and how teachers can use exercise times to promote new word learning, creative imagination, as well as pride in…

Teachers are sometimes puzzled and frustrated by some children's difficulties and troubles as these children respond aggressively when feeling that peers crowd too close or seem 'threatening'. This article provides a variety of bodily games to help children become more aware of how their bodies and muscles work. The activities suggested are…

Amid the ongoing tension between an authentic teaching/learning of English and the increasing encroachment of assessments, teachers might gain support for a "meaning-making" approach by dialoguing with an earlier generation of English educators who balanced "skills" and "cultural heritage" with a "personal…

At the start of this new school year, most educators' attention will be split between attending to students' social and developmental well-being and overcoming pandemic-driven lack of engagement in learning. When these two goals are addressed in tandem, students can be exposed to new challenges and experiences. This article explores how a…

Given the cultural diversity and pluralistic nature of the United States, an important part of citizenship education is helping children learn how to engage respectfully and dialogically with people whose beliefs and ways of life may differ significantly from their own. Such engagement is necessary for peaceful co-existence, as well as in the…

Presenting the Montessori tools of the Great Lessons highlights the power of storytelling in teaching. Carla Foster suggests that children should be aware of how their learning increases as wonder points them to the mystery of the unknown. Engaging in the dialect of wonder during presentations can bring participants to attention by suggesting that…

Why encourage children to play board games? In the increasing disconnect of our digital lives, playing games provides a way to connect and relate with others on a human level. Strategy and role-playing games provide intellectual challenges and stretch creativity to keep the gifted mind engaged in solving problems. At the same time, the players…

Outdoor experiences allow teachers to focus on expanding child learning in different domains. Nature experiences can sharpen child senses, enrich vocabulary, increase spatial understandings, and permit more practice for large muscle skills. As well, teachers can arrange outdoor activities to promote positive peer cooperation and aesthetic…

"Play" is a word used commonly to refer to children's preferred activities and to some adult activities, and it is often said that play promotes learning. But what is play exactly, and what and how do children learn through play? This essay begins with a description of an evolutionary, practice theory of play by German philosopher and…

Can science teaching contribute to developing skills for managing uncertainty towards the future and projecting imagination forwards? If so, how? In this paper, we outline an approach to 'teach the future' through science education. In the first part, we describe a framework that has been constructed to orient the design of teaching modules…

In an increasingly connected world, our students are listening to and making music outside the school context. As music educators, we need to better understand the media they use and incorporate this technology in our daily teaching to enhance music literacy in our classrooms.

This chapter explores the basis of rationality, arguing that critical thinking tends to be taught in schools as a set of skills because of the failure to recognize that choosing to think critically depends on the prior development of stable sentiments or moral habits that nourish a rational self. Primary among these stable sentiments are the…

Executive functions enable children to pay attention, follow instructions, apply what they have learned, have those "aha!" moments in which they grasp how multiple facts interrelate, think of creative solutions, obey social norms such as waiting their turn and not butting in line or jumping out of their seat, mentally construct a plan,…

"The High-Performing Preschool" takes readers into the lives of three- and four-year-old Head Start students during their first year of school and focuses on the centerpiece of their school day: story acting. In this activity, students act out stories from high-quality children's literature as well as stories dictated by their peers.…