This study investigates a particular behavior in talk-in-interaction that appears to be, at least in its most explicit form, relatively unique to children, that is, the behavior whereby one participant explicitly instructs another participant to say a specific phrase, after which the first participant then supplies a prefashioned response. Rather…

The Wheels Project took place from January to March, 2012 in a junior kindergarten/kindergarten classroom at the St. Nicholas location of Owl Child Care Services of Ontario in Waterloo. Owl Child Care Services, a nonprofit registered charity, operates seven centers in Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge, Ontario. Owl is one of the largest…

This research investigated the effects of different pedagogical approaches on the learning of length measurement in kindergarten children. Specifically examined were the pedagogical approaches of guided instruction, center-based learning, and free exploration in the context of a play-based learning environment. This mixed design research was…

We examined code-switching (CS) in the speech of twenty-four bilingual caregivers when speaking with their 18- to 24-month-old children. All parents CS at least once in a short play session, and some code-switched quite often (over 1/3 of utterances). This CS included both inter-sentential and intra-sentential switches, suggesting that at least…

The benefits of outdoor play for children's well-rounded development are maximized when children experience enjoyment and, at the same time, gain physical, motor, cognitive, and social-emotional competence. This study examined the quality of outdoor play in Chinese kindergartens, the dominant form of full-day early childhood education program…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether a child-centred play training model, filial play therapy, enhances child-teacher relationship and thereby reduces children's internalising problems (such as anxiety/depression and withdrawal) and externalising problems (such as aggressive and destructive behaviour). Sixty teachers (n = 60) and 60…

When doing research, or for that matter working in school-age childcare, the researcher/teacher is required to develop a plan for her/his work in spite of knowing that unexpected things will happen. This article aims to explore the relationship between the process of planning and unexpected events in childcare practice and action research. The…

In this article the authors re-examine Sir Thomas More's classic book "Utopia" as a potential source of ideas and concepts for examining, understanding and imagining contemporary education. Too often the concept utopia is used to criticize an idea, perspective or image as offering a simplistic solution to a complex problem, or, at its…

The aim of the study on which this paper is based was to explore in which situations and contexts Norwegian 1-3-year-olds experience subjective wellbeing in day care. The data in this study was collected through qualitative phenomenological observations of 18 children, and an inductive process of analysis was conducted. The results show that…

In this article, I explore laughter as a form of multimodal play in which adolescents' engage across contexts and in various configurations. With a few recent exceptions, a focus on unscripted play is largely missing from ongoing research and discussion about the education of adolescents. Whereas the space to play has been vitally important to the…

In vision-based augmented-reality (AR) environments, users view the physical world through a video feed or device that "augments" the display with a graphical or informational overlay. Our goal in this manuscript is to ask "how" and "why" these new technologies create opportunities for learning. We suggest that AR is…

This study examined the effects of nine toys on the play of 60 3- and 4-year-old children in culturally diverse preschool classrooms. The toys, which varied in their features and intended uses, were selected from a list of those that were nominated by teachers and parents as being developmentally beneficial. Each toy was video recorded for 240 h…

Although the Common Core standards do not prescribe pedagogy or forbid playful learning, kindergarten teachers will find it challenging to maintain a playful classroom under this reform. Kindergarten teachers have to cover a more rigorous and accelerated curriculum now, and they are doing so in a context that rewards procedural teaching.

Content analysis of a large-scale (N = 920) qualitative data set with MAXQDA12 from a nationwide questionnaire of nursery practitioners in Hungary was able to demonstrate various types of rules during free play: social, health and safety, and environment-related rules. Environment-related rules, which govern space utilisation in toddler groups,…

Electrodermal activity was examined as a measure of physiological arousal within a naturalistic play context in 2-year-old toddlers (N = 27) with and without autism spectrum disorder. Toddlers with autism spectrum disorder were found to have greater increases in skin conductance level than their typical peers in response to administered play…