Purpose: This article reflects on the adaption of Sarah Pink's video re-enactment methodology for exploring children's out-of-school lifeworlds. Design/methodology/approach: Video re-enactments originate in the work of Sarah Pink who developed the methodology to study everyday routines, including activities associated with people's energy…

This article illustrates the potential of using children's play and interest in constructive materials like LEGO bricks to support early literacy, particularly in improving the use of descriptive language. The article describes an action plan using storytelling and constructive LEGO play to improve the children's use of descriptive language and…

Educators' perceptions play a crucial role in shaping children's experiences. This exploratory study aimed to gather feedback from preschool educators who had conducted lessons at a natural play space in Singapore. The study site, known as a Nature Playgarden, is a green space within a public park. Created mostly with natural materials, the Nature…

The authors use the location-based, augmented-reality game "Wayfinder Live," which one of them designed, as a case study to analyze urban play. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining urban play, they expand existing approaches to the topic by drawing on current theories about interfaces, assemblages, and coding in such fields as media…

In the field of early childhood education, play has become synonymous with curriculum but is sometimes viewed narrowly as a pedagogical tool to enhance child development. However, it is known from a range of multidisciplinary work that child-initiated and child-guided forms and contexts of playing can offer rich insight into diversity in…

Anti-bias in early education is gaining importance, especially given the volatile social climate amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, Singapore preschools lack focus on anti-bias education despite being a multi-ethnic society. Set in the COVID-19 context, this teacher research developed and examined a curriculum to educate young children on…

Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It's the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed--skills like creativity, innovation, teamwork, focus, resilience, expressiveness, empathy, concentration, and executive function. Expert organizations…

This study examines the design and enactment of a secondary physics unit on electromagnetism. The unit used an educational videogame to support peer dialogic engagement in a Singapore secondary school by engaging learners with qualitative physics phenomena. As an example of game-based learning, the unit includes activities and resources that…

Play is a central discourse in policy and practice pertaining to young children's learning, development and well-being in many countries around the world. Dominant ways of understanding and advocating for play often construct universalising notions of children and childhood, overlooking that play is always-already culturally situated and…

A large amount of research has been conducted on play and in recent years the disappearance of play has been questioned (e.g., Brown in Kindergartners get little time to play. Why does it matter? 2016; Ebbeck and Waniganayake in Play in early childhood education: learning in diverse contexts, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, 2016).…

Many governments have launched the top-down early childhood curriculum (ECC) reforms to enhance the accountability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. The present discourse analysis of latest ECC policies across four diverse but representative countries -- Australia, China, New Zealand, and Singapore -- aims to examine the…

Is noun dominance in early lexical acquisition a widespread or a language-specific phenomenon? Thirty Singaporean bilingual English-Mandarin learning toddlers and their mothers were observed in a mother-child play interaction. For both English and Mandarin, toddlers' speech and reported vocabulary contained more nouns than verbs across book…

As a result of globalization, kindergarten curriculum frameworks in Asia have been strongly influenced by Western theories, pedagogies, and values. In this article, we argue that Singapore's "Nurturing Early Learners" and Hong Kong's "Kindergarten Education Curriculum Guide" present key notions that are inconsistent with…

The proliferation of information and communication technology (ICT) has changed the way we live and this also has implications on how it is used for learning and entertainment. However, technology and digital media are more often seen as gateways to entertainment and the attraction is a very strong one. This is true for adults and children…

This article explores the correspondence between the vision of play articulated in Singapore's national kindergarten curriculum framework and the play-related pedagogies enacted by teachers on the ground, particularly during Learning Centre Time (LCT). Influenced by neo-liberal ways of thinking, the curriculum states that "purposeful…