Despite the growing influence of the "material" turn within childhood studies and education, scholarship related to teaching and learning within the early childhood classroom remains a largely humanistic endeavour. By applying relational and multispecies onto-epistomologies to both children's classroom relations "and" our own…

Evolution is the integrative framework of the life sciences. Even though the topic is often not formally introduced before high school, young children already have various ideas about evolutionary principles (variation, inheritance, and selection) and their underlying key concepts (e.g., differential fitness, reproduction, and speciation).…

This study contributes to the research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) by exploring a case study of two Western Australian early childhood education classes who welcomed an Indigenous Elder to share their expertise about the native plants in the schools' bush space. The findings from this study demonstrate the impact…

The growing interest in outdoor early childhood education, even in countries with a weak environmental tradition such as Portugal, tends to be associated with a concern over the alienation between urban/Western children and nature. While educational projects in nature criticize this separation, they still maintain a bad culture vs good nature…

Preschoolers have different experiences in different environments. These experiences can stimulate children's imaginations. This longitudinal study examines the impact of preschool children's three-year experiences in early childhood institutions, which are their primary educational environments. The question 'Do preschoolers imagine different…

Previous research indicates that young children, as young as preschoolers, spontaneously draw dihedral and cyclic symmetries in their representations of the natural world. This is an intriguing find because at this age children have barely had their first contact with formal geometry and, therefore, one would not expect to find a use of symmetries…

The activity described here was designed to center on the observation of circadian rhythms in plants through the example of growing beans. The aim was to develop students' skills of systematic observation of various variables in the long-term. Our study took place at a Science and Arts Center with 17 gifted students in the third and fourth grades…

This quasi-experimental study aimed to examine content-area literacy instruction in comparison to a science-infused literacy instruction (SILI) to determine how these two approaches influenced 2nd grade students' ability to read and write science informational text and the students' attitude and motivation towards reading. After professional…

Although young children in Early childhood education (ECE) in Australia are often involved in learning in outdoor natural environments, research on their knowledge and attitudes towards plants is limited. Botanical literacies in young children involve developing knowledge and curiosity about plants, formulating questions about plants, and…

This research aims to design and apply a lesson plan to satisfy 3rd-grade inclusive education students' individual learning needs on the subject of plant life cycle, and to develop three instruction materials based on this lesson plan. In the first stage of this three-staged research, visually impaired students' individual learning needs were…

This paper explores children's understandings of Acknowledgement to Country practices and Aboriginal knowledges. Guided by the relational lenses of respect, responsibility and reciprocity, we conducted focus groups with children across five Australian early education centres. We found that Acknowledgement practices were evident through recitation…

The forest school approach to nature learning has gathered momentum in the UK and across parts of Europe including Scandinavia for well over 50 years. In other contexts that include Canada, China, New Zealand and Australia, nature-based early childhood education and care settings, influenced by European forest school approaches, are in a rapid…

The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore affordances for STEM-related skills in a nature preschool in central Texas. Observations were conducted along with the collection of videos and photographs of four preschool-aged participants. Informal interviews were also implemented during data collection and observations. Semi-formal…

Integration of content areas allows students to deepen and transfer knowledge. An area that allows for an organic integration of STEM content is through combining mathematics with science instruction. This paper describes how we integrated a lesson coupling flower structure with data representation in a Year 3 classroom. The lesson occurred over…

As environmental education and sustainability education play a fundamental role in training citizens who are more aware of global change and more environmentally responsible, organic learning is a recommended alternative learning experience for young children. This article describes how one kindergarten class in South Korea applied organic…