The author believes that in mathematics education, with ourselves AND with students or learners, people need to embrace failure as a beautiful thing -- an incredibly wonderful opportunity to learn more about the math or the tool or the people. The five characteristics of provocative objects can help to understand how to design such lovely failure,…

Research Findings: While leadership is not a novel concept, child leadership is still an under-cultivated field. Despite nearly nine decades of research on play leadership in preschool children, there still remains a paucity of empirical studies examining this developmental area, especially considering that leadership in the preschool years is an…

Evidence of the effectivity of play-based interventions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was evaluated by PRISMA-based literature study and a Risk of Bias (RoB) assessment. Many of the 32 eligible randomized controlled trials (RCT) reported improved social interaction, communication, daily functioning and play behaviour. They also…

Play-based learning is an approach used in early childhood education that is well supported by research on its varieties and effectiveness for young children's learning. Play-based learning meets the developmental needs of young children, but new research presented in this paper suggests that teenagers learn through play too. The experience of 25…

The purpose of this study is to compare the levels of playfulness and motivation of children with hearing loss in preschool and primary school based on their auditory perception levels. This study included 84 children with hearing loss aged 3-8 years and 50 normal-hearing children with similar demographic characteristics (the control group). The…

In this study, we make the case for using texts children create as part of their play as a means for assessing their developing print literacy knowledge. We assessed 4- and 5-year-old children's authentic texts using categories and criteria from the "Assessing Young Children's Marks/Drawing/Print" tool, a research-based, classroom…

In Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC), pedagogues traditionally work in a child-centred manner, valuing the children's experiences. During the last 150 years pedagogues have developed expertise in framing everyday life for children while paying double attention to the children's perspectives, on one hand, and to their own pedagogical…

In Britain, 'super-diverse' communities, where children navigate multiple cultural repertoires, are increasingly prevalent. However, Reception teachers are pressured to ensure children, aged four and five, conform to a narrow conception of 'school-readiness'. Research demonstrates children in multicultural contexts construct a 'third space',…

Drawing from Anzaldúa's (1999) ideas on borderlands, this conceptual article addresses the potential of basketball as a space for developing critical subjectivities within minoritized communities. Further, working through relevant scholarship at the intersections of race, play, education, and sports, connections are made as to how basketball is…

Play is a place of diverse meaning-making for young children and often central to family life. This paper reports on a family study in which the authors analyse Author One's family photos of young children's play across four generations. The photo analysis shows continuity and transformations in the types of play activities the young children…

The early childhood education (ECE) sector has been subjected to increased governance, which has manifested in an increased focus on monitoring and steering the daily life of preschools. It is well documented that instruments of governance change teachers' priorities and practices. Changes are not always in line with the aims of the governing…

Purpose: Children's vocabulary and syntactic skills vary upon school entry in depth and breadth, persistently influencing academic performance, including reading. Enhancing early communicative abilities through multisensory, playful, and conversational experiences is essential and will benefit children's school readiness. This study investigated…

Over the past decade the market for children's digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for formal STEM learning.…

The Sonoran Desert is a magical place full of beauty and wonder. With an increase each year in the number of new families calling Arizona their home, so also comes an increase in pre-conceived notions of the dangers of the Sonoran Desert. Dangers such as plants, animals, and weather conditions can cause fears in families. Though these fears are…

The authors explore children's symbolic play that involves themes of fear and darkness, and they investigate the nature of children's binary oppositions, particularly between self and other. Their account is based on a year-long qualitative study they conducted with seven children, four to ten years of age. They observed the children engage with…