Play Africa, with over 40 innovative exhibits and/or programs since inception, was created as a means to address the inequalities and lack of high-quality experiences that affect the early development of children from birth to age 10 in South Africa. The results from the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) paint a dire…

Play encourages physical and social activity creativity, and risk-taking. However, unstructured and risky play is on the decline. Our qualitative study explored the perspectives of Play Ambassadors, who facilitated a community-based loose parts play intervention ('play hubs') in Calgary parks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using semi-structured…

Inspired by Graham Harman's philosophy of human access, and within the 'flattening ontology' of Object Oriented Ontology, Ring o' Roses is speculated about as a finite object with ontological independence from humans, repertoire, song, utility, and cultural context. Ring o' Roses playfully dances us through an introduction to OOO, and on to the…

This case study is based on qualitative research carried out with four 4-year-old children attending a kindergarten in Malta. The aim of the study was to first observe children playing without adult intervention to see if, and how, they would engage with mathematical ideas as they played. In the second part of the study, I interacted with the…

Early childhood is a time of great creativity. Building creativity into the learning environment should be natural, organic, as observant teachers follow the child. This article provide tools for building creativity through play across the creative arts including dramatic play, movement and dance, music, and visual arts. Additionally, play and…

Structured and teacher-directed play focused on children's academic outcomes has proven problematic in Indonesian early childhood education. This contrasts with the PlayWorlds model, which emphasises both the primary activity of play and conceptual learning. However, there has been little research in Indonesia on the pedagogical aspects of the…

In this research we explore the extent to which computational thinking (CT) is evident in 3-6 year-old children's free play. CT is increasingly viewed as an important aspect of a child's school learning. Typically, CT is connected to learning with computers. Yet, much of learning in the early years is play-based, spontaneous, often…

Pretend play provides enriched environments for multiple cognitive and social purposes. The quality of children's pretend play depends on the process, including children's back and forth proposals and responses about the play frames. Proposing and responding to play ideas with metacommunication use, leadership-followership interactions are…

Robotics has emerged as a popular interdisciplinary pedagogical approach in the field of education to teach children STEM concepts. By providing playful learning experiences, the use of robots engages children in an active learning process, making it an effective tool to promote their targeted knowledge, skills, and disposition towards STEM,…

Several studies suggest that children's learning and engagement with the content of play activities is affected by the ways parents and children interact. In particular, when parents are overly directive and set more goals during play with their children, their children tend to play less or are less engaged by subsequent challenges with the…

Purpose: In the current study, we examined the alignment of language choice of bilingual parent-child dyads in play-based interactions. Method: Forty-four bilingual Spanish-English parent-child dyads participated in a 10-min naturalistic free-play interaction to determine whether bilingual children and their parents respond to each other in the…

This longitudinal study investigated parents' different pretend play behaviors (substitution, animation, and role enactment) to their infants during free play and the bidirectional links with infants' vocabulary development at 14 months (Time-1: N = 34, M[subscript age] = 14.23 months) and 20 months (Time-2: N = 34, M[subscript age] = 20.33…

Speech development occurs in highly variable environments; however, little is known about the effect of situational context on emerging infant vocalizations. At 4 time points (4, 6, 9, and 12 months), we longitudinally measured vocalizations of 104 White infant-caregiver dyads (41 girls) during three play contexts: book-sharing, toy play, and…

Children's theory of mind (ToM) is a crucial milestone in early childhood, with implications for prosocial behaviours and cognitive skills in later years. Therefore, it is important to characterise children's ToM and the factors influencing its development, such as socioeconomic status (SES) and parental interactive resources. However, most…

Sibling relationships may be strained when one sibling is diagnosed with autism and the other is not. The way that siblings interact during play is one indicator of the quality of this relationship. Non-autistic siblings have been taught to encourage play in their autistic siblings, but there is limited literature examining the impact of…