Responding to concerns that play is at risk in the early years of education, this article investigates teachers' current use of play in language and literacy instruction in Grade 1 and 2 Alberta classrooms. It addresses what teachers say they need to make play part of school-based language and literacy education. Survey findings show a recognition…

When one effectively employs the strategies of exploratory-learning, wait-time, intervention, guided reading, meaning, and phonological-morphological-syntactical awareness-for infants and on up-to 3rd grade students-all-in a Montessori-like-learning-literacy-setting replete with semantical interactions with phonology, syllabology, morphology, and…

We examined children's development of strategic and conceptual knowledge for linear measurement. We conducted teaching experiments with eight students in grades 2 and 3, based on our hypothetical learning trajectory for length to check its coherence and to strengthen the domain-specific model for learning and teaching. We checked the hierarchical…

The study investigated a relationship between National Board certification and perceived use of developmentally appropriate practices (DAP). A self-developed survey, the Early-childhood Teacher Inventory of Practices, was e-mailed to participants. Participants included 246 non-National Board-certified (non-NBCT) and 135 National Board-certified…

The Department of Early Learning (DEL), in partnership with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) and Thrive Washington, has published the Early Learning and Development Guidelines (guidelines) for children from birth through third grade. The guidelines replace the Early Learning and Development Benchmarks, which were first…

This article begins by revisiting an old dispute between the children's writer Chukovsky and the child psychologist Vygotsky on whether and how child literature should mediate development. It then considers child language language lessons in South Korea for clues about how such mediation might happen, and finds the development of rote language,…

The authors describe a five-day, literature-based thematic unit for second-graders on positive character traits, such as friendship, respect, perseverance, honesty, and cooperation, and how four books by Janell Cannon are integral to children's learning. (The authors offer suggestions throughout for adapting the unit for younger children.) They…