School counselors are charged with meeting the academic and personal/social needs of all students. Aggression can have a significantly negative effect on both areas in the school environment. It is imperative that these aspects are addressed in culturally and developmentally appropriate ways. Creative approaches based in play and art can be…

Aim: Underpinned by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), this research aimed to explore children's views around accessing their Article 31 right to play in two schools in England and Wales and to promote their Article 12 right to be heard. Methods: Views of 16 children were sought using child-centred methods. Child-led…

The popularity of "Pokémon GO" has been credited to its branding by the Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company Nintendo, the technological innovations of the game's developer Niantic, and the historical traditions of European avant-garde locative play. The author, instead, offers a different explanation that…

The authors use the location-based, augmented-reality game "Wayfinder Live," which one of them designed, as a case study to analyze urban play. Acknowledging the difficulty of defining urban play, they expand existing approaches to the topic by drawing on current theories about interfaces, assemblages, and coding in such fields as media…

Various "turns" within human geography ("emotional", "sensory", "experimental", and "creative") have highlighted the role that the senses play in our embodied and emotional experiences of place, and the need for more sensuous scholarly practices. Resulting work has enriched the discipline…

Community playgroups, which are one type of playgroup and early childhood service, operate on a weekly basis under the leadership of volunteer caregivers (including parents, kinship members, family-day carers and other adults in children's lives). Caregivers and children voluntarily attend and participate in community playgroups. Although…

Play as a teaching approach is a contemporary research area in early years that needs to be clearly defined. Early childhood teachers support the use of play, however the implementation of play as a teaching tool lacks clarity. This phenomenological study aimed to investigate early childhood teachers' perceptions and experiences of play-based…

In this paper, authors reflect on the implications of the report titled "Bold Beginnings: The Reception Curriculum in a Sample of Good and Outstanding Primary Schools" (Ofsted, 2017). This report is a review of curriculum for four-and five-year-old children in the United Kingdom. The "Bold Beginnings" report argues for teaching…

It is important for assessments used by occupational therapists to have documented evidence of their validity. This adds to the knowledge about what specific factors assessments measure and inform their utility for use in clinical practice by occupational therapists. The convergent validity between the Children's Assessment of Participation and…

Most research on children's play takes a context-dependent, adult-focused observational approach to the measurement of play. The current two studies present the development and psychometric properties of the Child Self-Report Playfulness (CSRP) scale, which was presented via "puppet-show" to two samples of children. Study 1, across 98…

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and…

This paper presents an heuristic that underpinned the development of a range of early years applications (apps) as part of the Early Learning Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Australia (ELSA) project (2016-19). The heuristic was developed to address a range of challenges that accompany the use of digital technologies in the…

In this series of experiments, we tested the limits of young infants' word learning and generalization abilities in light of recent findings reporting sophisticated word learning abilities in the first year of life. Ten-month-old infants were trained with two word-object pairs and tested with either the same or different members of the…

Coordinated attention between children and their parents plays an important role in their social, language, and cognitive development. The current study used head-mounted eye-trackers to investigate the effects of children's prelingual hearing loss on how they achieve coordinated attention with their hearing parents during free-flowing object…

Research suggests peer imitation can be taught using systematic procedures and can be embedded into ongoing play contexts with preschool-age children. However, additional research is needed to test procedures that may increase levels of peer imitation with toddlers with disabilities and in generalized contexts. We used a multiple probe across…