In this paper, authors reflect on the implications of the report titled "Bold Beginnings: The Reception Curriculum in a Sample of Good and Outstanding Primary Schools" (Ofsted, 2017). This report is a review of curriculum for four-and five-year-old children in the United Kingdom. The "Bold Beginnings" report argues for teaching…

It is important for assessments used by occupational therapists to have documented evidence of their validity. This adds to the knowledge about what specific factors assessments measure and inform their utility for use in clinical practice by occupational therapists. The convergent validity between the Children's Assessment of Participation and…

Most research on children's play takes a context-dependent, adult-focused observational approach to the measurement of play. The current two studies present the development and psychometric properties of the Child Self-Report Playfulness (CSRP) scale, which was presented via "puppet-show" to two samples of children. Study 1, across 98…

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and…

This paper presents an heuristic that underpinned the development of a range of early years applications (apps) as part of the Early Learning Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Australia (ELSA) project (2016-19). The heuristic was developed to address a range of challenges that accompany the use of digital technologies in the…

In this series of experiments, we tested the limits of young infants' word learning and generalization abilities in light of recent findings reporting sophisticated word learning abilities in the first year of life. Ten-month-old infants were trained with two word-object pairs and tested with either the same or different members of the…

Coordinated attention between children and their parents plays an important role in their social, language, and cognitive development. The current study used head-mounted eye-trackers to investigate the effects of children's prelingual hearing loss on how they achieve coordinated attention with their hearing parents during free-flowing object…

Research suggests peer imitation can be taught using systematic procedures and can be embedded into ongoing play contexts with preschool-age children. However, additional research is needed to test procedures that may increase levels of peer imitation with toddlers with disabilities and in generalized contexts. We used a multiple probe across…

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and…

Building from the concept of verbing mathematics as a culturally consistent and enabling mathematics education practice for Mi'kmaw learners, the authors present an elementary multiplication lesson affectionately named "Sets of, Rows of, Jumps of". Through examination of this specific set of tasks emerging notions of structuring, play,…

The standard educational gesture--in defense of its perceived secondary status relative to the "real world"--is to embed everything within its purview, such that even conceiving education as an art becomes a pedagogic imperative. In Anji County, China, we find an early childhood program (Anji Play) that uncouples play from this hierarchy…

The COVID-19 pandemic confronted practitioners with many challenges. For those of us working in early years and key stage 1, it also provided opportunities to sustain child-centred and play-based approaches to learning for longer than is usually the case. This reflective article draws on direct experience to argue for the importance of such…

Recent voices in creativity research emphasize the vital role that processes of active engagement and interaction play. These distributed, interactivity-based, and ecological accounts critique the reduction of creativity to mental mechanisms and eschew the methodological individualism that underlies this view. Instead, they elevate socio-material…

School counselors are uniquely qualified to meet the increasing mental health needs of students within the school setting. Play therapy is an evidence-based intervention used by school counselors to address the mental health needs of youth. Job demands require school counselors to provide goal-focused and time-sensitive interventions. Accordingly,…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of courses that integrate drama method in primary schools on the decision-making skills of students. In line with this purpose in present study pretest-posttest control grouped experimental research pattern has been employed. The study was conducted in Cahit Sitki Taranci Primary School located…