Decades of research support integrating play in kindergarten to benefit young students' social, emotional, and cognitive development. As academic readiness becomes a focus, time for play has decreased. As a result, there has been a demand for integration of play with content. This study modifies a project-based science curriculum about how living…

Humour, when engaged in the classroom, tends to be used as a means to hook youth into the 'real' material of school, when officially sanctioned at all. Humour can be dangerous, not-the-least in its potential to produce chaos, presenting difficulties in the rigid climate of accountability and standardisation. As we animate, humour can trouble…

Background: With standardization ever squeezing creative curricula in K-1 classrooms, creating time for a play-based multimodal writing curriculum that leverages children's strengths as storytellers is revolutionary. Due in part to accountability policy pressures, print-based writing and verbocentric writing feedback are still often privileged in…

This dissertation presents three studies on learning in children museums. The first study is a literature review of the research that was done on learning in children's museums between 2010 and 2021. In this review, I focused on presenting a current state of the field with insights into what research has been done and where there may be gaps in…

Contemporary discussions around gender roles, stereotypes, and play highlight the need for updated research on the influences of children's early play experiences and learning (Weisgram, 2018). Different types of play relate to different skills and vary by gender, such as spatial play and spatial skill (Jirout & Newcombe, 2015; Voyer, Voyer,…

Children experience a multitude of benefits in response to interactions with nature. Despite documented effects, children have increasingly spent less time outdoors over the last century and experienced higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. Although child-centered play therapy (CCPT) is a culturally and developmentally responsive…

This paper reports on a study carried out by tutors and students on Early Childhood Studies degree courses at a University in England. The research explored perspectives of three to six-year-old children's outdoor play in Danish forest kindergartens with the aim of troubling and informing approaches to outdoor pedagogy. Inspired by Somerville and…

"Research Findings:" Promoting children's science knowledge by adequate measures such as guided or free play is a cardinal goal of preschool. However, there is considerable variability in preschool teachers' instructional quality in block play, which might be associated with children's domain-specific science skills but also their…

This article describes a project-based social studies activity that gave young children the autonomy to photograph what they wanted within the classroom environment while interacting with peers. Social studies learning in the early years has great potential to offer active, playful, and meaningful experiences for children and can prepare young…

This paper contributes to the expanding body of research on Playful Learning (PL) within Higher Education (HE), offering an in-depth examination of narratives concerning student participation and engagement in PL emerging as educators reflect on their experiences with PL in Danish teacher education and social education. In attempt to nuance and…

This study aimed at understanding and investigating the lived experiences of early childhood teachers' observation practices as a professional tool. Interpretative phenomenological approach was utilized to investigate participants' experiences deeply from their lived experiences. The current study's participants consisted of five early childhood…

Play, and especially free play, offers a unique opportunity for children to act with agency. Yet the regulated and routinized structure of early childhood education and care settings, impedes children's agentic action which is limited by adult-imposed rules. The present cross-cultural study aims to explore the extent to which Early Childhood…

This article is based on qualitative and quantitative data collected from teachers and pupils in Danish schools in June 2020, as schools reopened following closures in the spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It investigates the transformations in school life that took place in this period in response to strict official guidelines to prevent the…

During the past decade, the field of family language policy has broadened its scope and turned its attention to diverse family configurations in versatile sociolinguistic contexts. The current study contributes to this endeavor by focusing on two single-parent families who live in Finland and who strive to support Russian as a family language.…

Playing is crucial for children's growth and learning, and it is essential to understand and improve the role of educators in facilitating learning through play. This study aimed to investigate the beliefs of early childhood educators in Colombia's aeioTU program about play, which is based on the Reggio Emilia philosophy and focuses on art,…