This study contributes to child voice research that seeks to understand the early childhood education and care (ECEC) experiences of young children. Forty-seven children from seven disadvantaged communities in NSW Australia, including urban, rural and remote areas, participated in a face-to-face interview guided by Ecocultural theory. The children…

The objective of the present study is to capture children's voices to compare traditional half-day and play-based full-day kindergarten children's perspectives on two research questions: What is important about kindergarten, and what is your favourite thing about school? Children's responses were compared for emerging academic and social themes.…

Play is traditionally considered the foundation of learning in the early years. Because play is characterized by free choice, it can be difficult for adults to ensure all learning is useful for children. The intervention described here took a novel approach to this problematic. It exposed 17 four-year-olds to different adult demonstrations to see…

The acquisition of everyday scientific concepts by 3-6-year-old children attending early childhood institutions has been widely studied. In contrast, research on science learning processes among younger children is less extensive. This paper reports on findings from an exploratory empirical study undertaken in a "stay and play" service…

The article describes a comparative case study on children's agentive orientations in two Hong Kong preschools, one is play-based and the other is academically focused. Agentive orientations were measured using Reunamo's interview tool, which focuses on children's uses of accommodative and agentive orientations in everyday situations. The findings…

This paper provides a brief description of the Greek-Cypriot early childhood education system and focuses on the current education reform. We focus on one of the main changes of the reform, a new status for play within the daily educational programme. The goal of this paper is two-fold; first to portray play in the former and current proposed…

PreschoolThis study investigated the nature of parent involvement and parent-educator communication in prior-to-school early childhood settings and school, to explore relations to social capital variables and consistencies and changes in practices over time. Parent interview and teacher questionnaire data from two waves of the Longitudinal Study…

This study analyses the beliefs and self-reported practices of preschool teachers with regard to the concept of child-centred education, as well as the consistency between these beliefs and practices. Data were collected via interviews with 20 female teachers employed in public preschools in Ankara, Turkey. The results indicated that the…

This study aims to investigate preschool staff's view of emergent literacy approaches in Swedish preschools with the following research question: How do preschool staff describe and explain the approaches they use in the emergent literacy environment of preschool? Focus-group interviews were conducted with 52 participating preschool units.…

This article describes the introduction of creative movement activity in three Hong Kong kindergartens to promote children's creativity. The purposes of the study were to examine the effectiveness of creative movement activity in promoting children's creativity and teachers' perceptions of the activities. The movement activities were designed…