This is the closing paper in a "Scottish Educational Review" collection on "Making Space for Play in Scottish Education." The paper reflects on the key conclusions from the six papers and three notes that comprise the collection. It identifies a baker's dozen of priority actions for those concerned to enrich Scottish education…

Computational thinking, which includes foundation skills such as matching, sequencing and decomposing, is increasingly becoming an educational focus with young children (Strawhacker, Lee, & Bers, 2018). This research focusses primarily on the nature of young children's play with tangible coding technologies (TCTs) and the role of multimodal…

Vocabulary development is a crucial aspect of literacy. It is our duty as teachers to enrich the language of our students to better prepare them for a successful lifetime of communication. This paper offers several methods to enhance levels of speech in the classroom. Some of the techniques included are the use of repetitive reading, reading…

Drawing from a social network perspective, we examined the extent to which children with and without disabilities play with each other in preschool inclusive classrooms and identified malleable child characteristics that would support children forming these cross-status play interactions. A total of 200 children with disabilities and 301 children…

Social pretend play may have a positive impact on children's social development because it involves positive peer interactions and challenges their social-cognitive abilities. The current study aimed to investigate whether variations in play tutors' active support and play management are associated with variations in children's social pretend play…

This paper examines play as a fundamental children's activity, giving particular attention to the inclusion of children with impairments at play and children's shared constructions of their playworlds. Children with impairments are customarily portrayed as incompetent, unskilled or deficient in their play, thus being positioned on the margins (or,…

UK policy and curriculum frameworks for early years appear to value play for learning; however, its implementation is fraught with misunderstandings and difficulty. It has been suggested that one of the difficulties is due to the language and terminology regarding play used in official documentation and how this contrasts with the beliefs and play…

This study focuses on the design of play-based learning activities for chemistry in preschool. Viewing chemistry as a part of our past and present culture instead of as a subject, provides the backdrop for a more holistic approach to chemistry within this specific environment. A cultural-historical perspective, together with scaffolding, emergent…

In recent years, the authors have witnessed the rebirth of board games. This contribution aims to investigate the educational potential of non-random board games in two ways: the comparison of performances of "expert adult players" and "adult non-players" through a correlation study (n=45) and the comparison between the results…

In this essay, I detail the entanglements of three young Black boys -- Million Dollar Man, DJ, and Francisco -- and their interests in and experiences with WWE wrestling. Drawing on posthumanist philosophies that attend to the productive relationships between the human and more-than-human objects, I consider ethnographic data composed during a…

This article reports and compares results from an interview study of early childhood teachers in the U.S. and Hong Kong, with a focus on the math outcomes that children may gain from play with unit blocks. Teachers were interviewed to obtain their ideas of the benefits of unit block play in three focal areas: geometry, measurement, and numeracy.…

Eminent scientists, like Einstein, worked with theoretical contradiction, thought experiments, mental models and visualisation--all characteristics of children's play. Supporting children's play is a strength of early childhood teachers. Promising research shows a link between imagination in science and imagination in play. A case study of 3…

Early temperament predicts various aspects of development. In large-scale studies, temperament is often assessed via parental report because naturalistic and structured observations are costly and bear the risk of subject loss. However, the validity of such parental reports has been disputed repeatedly. This article compared parental reports on…

It is well documented that recess helps elementary schoolchildren learn and develop socially, emotionally, and physically. Rather than simply a break from class, recess offers benefits with the potential to enhance student learning. Yet many children, especially those in low-income and Black and Latinx communities, do not have the same access to…

Digital gaming involves all kinds of activities, both individually and as a team, in an online or offline environment through an electronic device. It is stated that the age of playing digital games has decreased to 5-6 years. The aim of this study is to investigate the motivation of students in different faculties of Kastamonu University to play…