Asserts that puppets help children in storytelling and role playing, encouraging creativity and language development. Details types of puppets and how to construct them, including: (1) figure stick puppets; (2) paper plate puppets; and (3) garden glove puppets. Describes how to construct different puppet stages for performance. (BGC)

Surveyed Montessori preprimary teachers concerning attitudes toward pretend play in the classroom. Found mixed feelings among teachers toward pretend play. By a margin of 2 to 1, teachers were dissatisfied with the training they had received regarding the role of children's play in Montessori settings. (KB)

Goals of block building in early childhood classrooms focus on physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development. Reports survey results of the value teachers place on block play. Offers illustrations of task cards to use with blocks in math, language arts, social studies, and science. Discusses guidelines and suggests idea cards and sentence…

From adding richness and variety to learning, to redesigning a playground, this highly accessible text will provide early years practitioners with a wealth of ideas on how to foster creative play and learning in the outdoor environment with a focus on interacting with the natural world. "Nature and Young Children" contains many simple ideas on the…

A picture is a patchwork of color laid out in a private space in which lie flat imitations of life. Such a patchwork constitutes a make-believe visual field. The author rolls out this suggestion under the following headings: Intention, Form and Content, Ontology, Picture Space, Make-believe, Photography, and Resemblance. This commentary focuses on…

Despite a strong tradition of viewing "coded equivalence" as the underlying principle of linguistic semiotics, it lacks the power needed to understand and explain language as an empirical phenomenon characterized by complex dynamics. Applying the biology of cognition to the nature of the human cognitive/linguistic capacity as rooted in the…

This exploratory study represents one of the first attachment investigations of Japanese children who have been institutionalized. Mental representation of attachment was assessed using George and Solomon's (1990, 1996, 2000) Attachment Doll Play Classification System of the Bretherton et al. (1990) doll play story stems. Participants were 32…

Play is a very critical element in and has important long-lasting impacts on child's development and learning. However, it has numerous definitions many of which are unclear. There is also a lack of research done with Turkish participants about the meaning of child's play according to early childhood educators who have significant roles in this…

The present study explores word boundary behaviours in the spontaneous speech of a group of 6 preschool children. Speech collected in play settings is examined for the presence of normal and atypical connected speech behaviours, and to identify specific instances of open and close word juncture behaviours. The findings suggest that developmental…

There is a growing debate on the balance between making sure our children are safe versus letting the children play in physically and emotionally stimulating and challenging environments. The focus is now on children's right to do risky play. There are no studies categorising risky play. The present study has aimed to do this. Qualitative…

This study investigated possible changes in social play and initiations in eight boys (5 to 7-years-old) with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) who were moving from an old to a new school playground that was designed specifically to enhance playful peer interaction. Each boy was observed for half an hour over three occasions in the old, then the…

Research on play suggests that children of all ages benefit from engaging in play activities (Bergen, 2004). With the recent emphasis on standards and testing, however, many teachers have felt the increased pressure to spend time on structured learning events, leaving few moments of relaxation in a child's day (Chenfeld, 2006). Many elementary…

The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major challenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresentational theory, young children possess both production and…

We define a "hot potato" to be a good that may be traded a finite number of times, but which becomes a bad if and when it can no longer be exchanged. We describe a game involving such goods, and show that non-acceptance is a unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium for rational egoists. Contrastingly, experiments with human subjects show…

Grandparents play a significant role in childcare and one activity that frequently occurs within this context is story-reading. However, relatively little attention has been given to the potential part that grandparents can play in terms of language and literacy development of young children. This article reports on work investigating the…