This paper discusses the concept of "primal landscapes" as a way of conceptualising the interactions between children and the environments they grow up in. The paper discusses this concept drawing on empirical research conducted in the field of human geography on how people learn about their environments. The research employed a…

One of the most challenging daily experiences of teaching young adolescents is helping them transition from Piaget's concrete to the formal operational stage of cognitive development during the middle school years. Students who have reached formal operations can design and test hypotheses, engage in deductive reasoning, use flexible thinking,…

Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist, coined the term "Just Community" to describe a community built on trust and resolution, in which each member participates democratically in the development of the rules and regulations that govern their community life (Kohlberg, 1985). In a school, this means that students and teachers alike actively participate…

Resilience is an important trait because it is the human capacity to face, overcome, be strengthened by, and even transformed by the adversities of life. This guide provides ways to promote resilience in children and help them learn to improve many aspects of their own resilience. The guide is centered on three features, or sources, of resilience:…

This booklet discusses techniques and activities intended to help early childhood educators to explain the structure and function of the human body to preschool children. It reviews typical questions that preschoolers have about what goes on inside their bodies, observations that children make about the human body, how children draw the human…

Twice exceptional students are those who have emotional disturbances or behavioral disorders (E/BD) and who also display characteristics of high intellectual ability. Case studies were developed over a 3-year period on three male junior high school students who fit this definition. Data were interpreted using Kazimierz Dabrowski's Theory of…

This document consists of seven policy issue papers developed by the Connecticut Early Childhood Education Council, an action-oriented coalition of statewide organizations concerned with early childhood education. Members include teachers, school administrators, children's librarians, child care providers, Head Start directors, State Department of…

Intended for use in Florida training programs for caregivers of infants and toddlers with disabilities, this guide presents an overview of the Model of Interdisciplinary Training for Children with Handicaps (MITCH); provides a user's guide to the series of MITCH modules; and presents specific information for presenting Module 1, which focuses on…

This set of checklists in separate English- and Spanish-language versions, is designed to help parents and childcare providers determine through observations a child's developmental progress from birth to age 5. The checklists are excerpted from the "Slow and Steady, Get Me Ready" guidebook, written by a retired kindergarten teacher with 25 years…

The development of written language is intertwined with children's experiences with diverse symbolic media. During their second year of life, children begin to use symbolic tools to invest meaning in drawn marks. The evolution of drawing is linked in complex ways to dramatic gesture and speech, sometimes combined in social play. Exploratory play…

To understand more fully the nature of children's difficulties in reading single words, a study investigated whether learning disabled students attend to different word features than nondisabled students, and whether there is a developmental sequence in the word features focused on by disabled and nondisabled children. Word sorts were used to…

A study was designed to identify and codify behavioral trends in the composing process of early writers' narrative attempts in literate environment instructional settings. The study also examined regressive patterns within behavioral responses to determine how development in one area of the writing task influenced the development in other areas.…

This study used survey data to identify college students' dominant learning stages, basing it on Marcia Baxter Magolda's (1992) Epistemological Reflection Model. A total of 699 alumni of a midwestern community college who had completed at least 30 credit hours transferable to baccalaureate degrees elsewhere completed a survey that incorporated…

Providing a developmental perspective of literacy learning as a way to understand the literacy process, this book describes how children become skilled readers through the following five stages of the literacy growth process: emergent reading, initial reading, transitional, basic literacy, and refinement. Unlike most other literacy books which are…

A 10-week program was developed to provide structure, consistency, and organization in the classrooms of 30 elementary-age emotionally handicapped (EH) students. The program sought to assist the students with staying on task, becoming structured, and reducing inappropriate behavior. The program contained two basic components (a behavioral…