This project explores children's engagement in play activities and how caregivers supported their children's play during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our sample included six primary caregivers (five mothers and one father) of at least one child attending a private, child learning centre in the northeastern United States. Child participants (four boys…

Background: Speech-language pathology services are among the most frequently accessed services for young autistic children. Therefore, understanding the nature of these services, what challenges these clinicians face, and what supports they value is critical for developing appropriate policies and practices that can maximize positive outcomes for…

This study examined the relationship between young children's cognitive development and fathers' engagement in early childhood. The study examined fathers' home engagement patterns based on literacy, play, and caregiving activities when their children were 9-month-old and these patterns of engagement in 9-month-old were related to children's…

Play is a central occupation of children, contributing to their development. Play opportunities depend on physical, social, and cultural environments. Family-focused programs need to be developed and adapted to diverse populations. This study endeavored to evaluate the effectiveness of a short-term intervention enrichment program for a group of…

This study focuses on a close examination of how children express themselves at ECEC in play situations, which form an integral and large part of a typical day. The main research question has been: How can children's social and emotional expressions be understood through analyses of communication and interaction during free play? A qualitative…

What does it mean to be a Froebelian in the 21st century? It is not a new question but one that is more urgent than ever. Not only since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic but for years, young children and their well-being have been thrust aside, and Early Childhood Education and Care worldwide has been treated as subordinate. The Global Education…

Children continuously engage in developing theories about how the world works as they inquire through play and interactions with others. In this study, we investigated children's in-process thinking in the form of working theories about language as they participated in engagements around dual language picturebooks in an afterschool club. Our…

One of the realities of being in a mentoring relationship is that, like all human relationships, it will have its ups and downs, moments of joy and moments of challenge. Mentors are not simply friends to young people, nor are they simply "authority figures." They show up to these relationships with purpose and a desire to help that young…

Purpose: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at risk for exclusion from play with their peers due to difficulty with communication skills. Video augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology has the potential to support communication within the context of play using videos with integrated visual scene displays. This…

Early childhood education (ECE), which includes both early childhood care and preschool education, provides children with an essential foundation for success in life. As Erikson (1950, 1968), an acclaimed theorist of childhood development, has explained, the preschool years are critical to the subsequent intellectual, social, psychological and…

This ethnographic, qualitative case study empirically explores how six youth from refugee backgrounds positioned their identities through design choices in producing reaction videos--a popular YouTube genre--at school in their settlement context. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three ways in which youth took ownership of how…

The article is an attempt to discover how useful the existing literature in field of designing children's playful learning products, is for people who wish to create quality toys and games. It sets out from the right of children to play, and the assertion that plays is crucial for the development of children, to the massive size of the global toy…

In this excerpt from the author's new book, "Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming," (Princeton University Press, 2018), she discusses some of the work game live streamers undertake to convert their private play into public entertainment. She details the layers involved in a typical broadcast and argues that this…

This study is mainly based on conducted naturalistic descriptive observation of 13 children ages 6-8 years using open-ended materials in their play at the Creative Play Club (CPC). The research carefully examines and analyzes how four boys and nine girls in the CPC used open-ended materials in their play over 8 weeks. One aim was to evaluate…

This chapter describes instances of play within a teaching episode on integer addition and subtraction. Specifically, this chapter makes the theoretical distinction between integer play and playing with integers. Describing instances of integer play and playing with integers is important for facilitating this type of intellectual play in the…