In this article, the authors bring together the cultural studies of emotion with theories that foreground the agency of place and objects in order to analyse the entanglement of place, children and emotion (particularly fear) in children's play encounters. When children, objects and places come into play with each other, intensities and emotions…

In this article, the authors discuss the light and dark side of attachments and attachment style in physical and digital worlds. They argue that many games offer opportunities for the generation of new and meaningful attachments to both physical and digital others. They discuss two "fundamental attachment errors" and show how these can…

My daughter has always been drawn to the frightening and the spooky, with a special interest in zombies. When she was four years old, she and I played a zombie video game together which instigated a series of zombie-related events. This article is a collection of metonymic moments rendered in comics and writing, that revisits these events as…

Background: Today, children play in transmedia franchises that bring together media characters, toys, and everyday consumer goods with games, apps, and websites in complex mergers of childhood cultures, digital literacies, consumer practices, and corporate agendas. Recent research on youth videogames and virtual worlds suggests the productive…

In this paper, we present a collaboration project within one urban Puerto Rican classroom, focused on constructing a critical literacy inquiry curriculum grounded in the students' out-of-school literacy practices in their communities, including their experiences with media and popular culture. We focused on a critical literacy and media inquiry…

Increasing amounts of research show that fathers' involvement in children's lives contributes to the child's social, emotional and cognitive development; however, much of the evidence comes from fathers' caregiving and object play. This exploratory study compared the characteristics of 24 Australian fathers' play in two contexts--toy play and…

How is it possible to form concepts in early childhood education? This question was the starting point of this study using recreational activities as a tool to support ecological literacy. The research was conducted with children aged 4-5 years in a Brazilian school. Initially, the meanings children attributed to the concept of a "food…

Play is an important activity in young children's lives. It is how children explore their world and build knowledge. Although free play, which is play that is totally child directed, contributes to children's learning, self-regulation and motivation, adults' participation in children's play is critical in their development, especially their…

Increasingly, children who start school have already acquired basic reading and writing skills provided by their parents or preschool teachers. However, even if we choose to accept the fact that by teaching preschool children how to read and write parents wish to help them integrate successfully into the school environment and methods of work, we…

The purpose of the current study was to assess the utility, feasibility, and reliability of Fitbit accelerometers to measure physical activity (via steps) of 15 young children simultaneously during recess. Fitbit-recorded steps per minute (SPM) were used as the primary measure to assess levels of activity in children playing in various structured…

Children with autism have atypical gaze behavior but it is unknown whether gaze differs during distinct types of reciprocal interactions. Typically developing children (N = 20) and children with autism (N = 20) (4-13 years) made similar amounts of eye contact with an examiner during a conversation. Surprisingly, there was minimal eye contact…

The history of parks and recreation is deeply rooted in child's play. From Joseph Lee's writings about the developmental benefits of child's play at the beginning of the 20th century to the establishment of the University of Illinois's Motor Performance and Play Research Laboratory in the 1960s and 1970s, child's play has been a central focus of…

In this research, it was aimed to reveal the knowledge and opinions about play in pre-school teachers' mathematics educational process. The research was designed as a mixed method. The qualitative dimension of the study included the analysis and interpretation of the data obtained through a semi-structured interview form. The quantitative…

The purpose of this study is to provide innovative design criteria for urban playgrounds based on the principles of biophilic design. Derived from the biophilia hypothesis, biophilic design aims to provide humans with a positive contact with nature in a built environment. The biophilia hypothesis asserts that human's attachment with nature is a…

This project is about exploring and strengthening young children's story-telling expertise. Building on research that shows that children's narrative competence is linked to later literacy learning at school, we wanted to understand more fully how conditions for literacy learning are, and could be, supported within early years education settings.…