This study explores humour's role in a holistic craft process when 7-8-year-olds design personalised soft toys. Humour enhances learning environments by fostering joy, belonging and a positive atmosphere, acting as a motivational tool in experiential and arts-based learning. The study aims to answer the following questions: (1) What are the…

Play during childhood is essential to growth and learning. Little is known about whether categories of toys moderate play behaviors at different ages, or how children interact with toys that are simple, appropriate, or complex for their developmental level. Two hundred and forty-three children between the ages of 1 and 8 years, divided into four…

This study aims to examine the views of mothers regarding plays and toys which are of great significance also for children with intellectual retardation and learning disability. This study was conducted through a mixed method by using qualitative and quantitative methods together. Seventy-five mothers who participated in the study were chosen by…

This paper implements a feminist new material lens to illuminate how the spaces and objects of play are actively involved in the enactment and normalisation of gender violence in kindergarten. Findings from data collected in two Canadian kindergartens show how the familiar and mundane spatial-material arrangements of play, namely the use of…

Pretend play is important for children's development. However, recent research indicates that, as preschool children age and get more proficient at pretend play, they prefer real objects. We examined whether toddlers prefer real objects when they are younger as well as when they are older and more proficient in pretend play situations. Forty-three…

Programmable robotics is recently used in early childhood education (ECE) to introduce programming and computational thinking (CT) skills. However, there is a further need for research to contrast the efficacy of children's participation in robot programming and traditionally beneficial ECE activities. The present study thus investigated the…

This article aims to summarise research on this topic; analyse, reflect on and discuss earlier research on play and learning using a few empirical examples; and determine what constitutes an appropriate educational approach concerning war and weapon within an early childhood education and care (ECEC) setting. This is done by putting feminist…

Dolls have accompanied children with a variety of activities, including the practice of reading. However, the current literature has neglected to provide empirical support that reading to dolls has influenced reading fluency or the child's belief in their reading ability, known as reader self-efficacy. This study sought to answer the questions of…

Given the established role of parental talk in the growth of math knowledge in preschoolers, there has been an increasing focus on identifying ways to promote parental math talk at this stage of child development. The current study investigated how parental math talk is affected by features of play materials and contexts. The features were…

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead…

This qualitative study investigated teachers' beliefs about the availability of play materials in the physical indoor environment of early childhood education and care (ECEC). The empirical data were gathered from fieldwork in eight child groups in ECEC institutions across Norway and comprised 13 semistructured interviews with teachers. The…

Verbal testimony about reality status is critical but often contradictory. These studies address whom children consider reliable sources of information about reality and how they evaluate conflicting testimony. In Study 1, seventy 4- to 8-year-olds heard an adult or child provide testimony about how to cook food and use toys, and about the reality…

The present article displays a research designed to investigate the role of the toy library as a research laboratory focusing on plays and educational processes in Pedagogy courses. It is a theme of relevance, as it is necessary to deepen the conception of the toy library as a scientific space for learning, aiming at the improvement of the…

Christopher Bensch is vice president for collections and chief curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. He oversees the acquisition of and care for the world's most comprehensive collection of playthings. He also serves as the primary spokesperson for the National Toy Hall of Fame. Andrew Borman is digital games curator at…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…