Older adult volunteers

At a time when the need for quality programs for preschool children has never been greater, directors and teachers of very young children have witnessed a rapid decrease in food support, classroom assistance, and training. While financial austerity for social programs is likely to continue well into the 80s, better utilization of existing volunteer resources can have a positive impact upon services for children. Perhaps the most untapped yet most powerful volunteer resource for improving programs for young children today is the elderly.James L. Hoot is currently Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at North Texas State University. He has been actively involved in intergenerational research, has published widely, and has made numerous presentations concerning involvement of the elderly in child care programs.     

Technology as Play

The role of play in young children's learning has always been considered to be of primary importance. Thus, early childhood programs have been characterized by curricula that provide plenty of opportunity for young children to play and interact with materials, ideas, and people. As we approach the new millennium, the impact of the new information technologies on play and as play, for young children need to be conceptualized and discussed. This article begins that discussion. The view that there are opportunities for young children to play in technological environments as well as with traditional materials and contexts is presented.     

Preschoolers' Funds of Knowledge Displayed Through Sociodramatic Play Episodes in a Bilingual Classroom

Funds of knowledge displayed by young children during sociodramatic play in a two-way bilingual preschool classroom are identified. Twelve preschoolers participated in a microethnographic study of children's language and culture in a small rural community of South Texas. The study sought to identify cultural elements or traits of Mexican American children exhibited during sociodramatic play. The cultural traits identified as funds of knowledge include language, values and beliefs, ways of discipline, and the value of education, among others. It is suggested for teachers to use sociodramatic play as a tool to observe children and learn about their funds of knowledge in order to implement a culturally reflective curriculum.     

In support of drama in early childhood education, again

Early childhood practitioners appear to be in an unending battle to legitimize the use of the dramatic arts in the classroom. Even early childhood educators who accept the value of dramatic play seldom utilize the potential of drama fully. The purpose of this article is to reinforce the value of drama and theater for young children. Dramatic play, creative drama, theater, and television—a form of drama — all have their place in the development of young children.     

论象征性游戏对幼儿主体性发展的价值

幼儿主体性是幼儿本身所固有的内在特性,其发展是幼儿教育的重要任务。象征性游戏是2—6岁幼儿典型的游戏形式,其对幼儿主体性发展具有重要的价值和意义。幼儿主体性发展的内容包括主动性、独立性和创造性三方面的发展,幼儿参与象征性游戏活动,有利于促进幼儿的主动性发展,增强幼儿的独立性并激发幼儿的创造性。幼教工作者应当提升象征性游戏对幼儿主体性发展的价值认识,重视并鼓励幼儿的象征性游戏活动。     

'Well,I've Not Done Any Work Today. I Don't Know Why I Came to School'. Perceptions of Play in the Reception Class

The place of play in the education of young children has been the focus of much interest in the past. But the findings from this research project demonstrate that there remains a significant amount of confusion about the role that play has in young children's education. In particular we found that there is a clear distinction between the rhetoric and reality of play in the reception class. Further, there was evidence of real anguish for some early years workers who were failing to offer the play activities that they knew should be provided. These findings are particularly interesting at present, since the debate on the role of play has once again emerged as fundamental in the attempt to define a curriculum appropriate to the needs of the 3-6 year olds who, from the year 2000, will be required to work within the highly contentious Foundation Stage of the National Curriculum.     

The Relation between Early Childhood Teachers’ Conceptualization of “Play” and Their Practice: Implication for the Process of Learning to Teach

For centuries, educators and psychologists have advocated “play” as the ideal activity for the development of young children. Actually, play has been found currently to be the central pedagogy in the learning of young children in 21 countries in the world. However, the quality of play-based pedagogy is becoming a key concern across countries. Scholars found that play is either too loosely framed to result in children’s optimal development; or it is too “teacherly” and looses the essence of play. The recent report released by OECD highlighted its concern about play in early childhood education and, urged international researchers and educators to make efforts to bridge the gap. Hong Kong is not an exception on the issue of play enactment. Though resources have been put in for the professional upgrading of early education teachers in the last two decades, the learning and teaching style is still didactic and there appears to be a misinterpretation of play-based pedagogy. The present paper attempts to explore the issue through early childhood teachers’ conceptualization of “learning and teaching through play” with the aim of understanding the problem and shedding light for better ways to prepare teachers in this sector.     

Big books: How to make them and use them

Big — bold — beautiful — they're called big books, and preschool teachers are regularly discovering their exciting educational potential. Traditionally, using books with children is a practice that adults have used since they were first developed in the sixteenth century. Indeed, most preschool classrooms include centers which are called by a variety of names — book nook, book corner, book center, storytime center, reading center, or some other title. It's rare to find a child who does not respond to book reading or storytelling, and teachers of young children routinely plan time each day to read a book to their youngsters. Educationally, their use is acceptable practice for children of all ages. Laverne Warner is a professor of early childhood education at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX. This article draws on material published by the author in Texas Child Care Quarterly,(Summer, 1990), 13:4, 3–8.     

New concepts of play and the problem of technology,digital media and popular-culture integration with play-based learning in early childhood education

Technology, digital media and popular culture form an important aspect of young children’s life-worlds in contemporary post-industrial societies. A problem for early childhood educators is how to most effectively integrate these aspects of children’s life-worlds into the provision of play-based learning. Traditionally, research has considered barriers to teacher uptake of technologies in the early years, or teacher beliefs and attitudes about using technologies with young children. An alternative perspective focuses on children’s play as the foundation for early childhood curriculum provision and argues that what is needed instead are ‘new’ concepts of play more appropriate for explaining children’s contemporary play experiences in post-industrial societies. This article examines the influence of a new concept of play called ‘web-mapping’ on teachers’ curriculum practices in early childhood education, and finds that, according to Vygotsky’s ideas about explicit and implicit mediation, new concepts of play are likely to provide a fruitful avenue for addressing the ‘problem’ of technology, digital media and popular-culture integration in early childhood education.     

Waterworks: Activities for 1 through 6 year olds

We wrote these activities because water play provides both fun and valuable learning opportunities for young children. Water play can provide calming activities for any child. Water play activities can reinforce the principles of scientific experimentation and mathematical reasoning. They integrate cognitive, fine motor, and gross motor skills. We encourage all teachers and caregivers to provide water play opportunities for the young children in their care. Excerpted from Waterworks,by Jeanne C. James and Randy F. Granovetter. ©1987 Kaplan Press, 1320 Lewisville-Clemmons Road, Lewisville, NC 27023.     

Potential for play in a primary literacy curriculum

Abstract

The benefits of play in the learning and development of young children has long been recognized by researchers and early childhood educators. As new teachers face the challenges of increasingly diverse classrooms, in an increasingly demanding political climate, the potential of play has implications for teacher educators who prepare those new teachers. This study investigated literacy use during play in the researcher's culturally diverse first grade classroom, finding that children applied various functions of print, practiced skills, and explored concepts that had been introduced in the formal curriculum. These observations reinforce the notion that play encompasses many of the conditions necessary for literacy development and is a useful means of extending and supporting the formal literacy curriculum. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.     

Outdoor play environments for infants and toddlers

Every adult is aware that babies enjoy playing. Even before an infant is able to grasp an object, brightly colored toys are suspended in a crib or held for him to enjoy. Once the baby is able to crawl, stand, and walk, the opportunities to explore the environment and play are expanded. While we are familiar with indoor play areas for infants and toddlers in homes, churches, or caregiving centers, only recently has there been significant interest in the design of outdoor play environments. Because more children are being placed in caregiving settings in the early months after birth, awareness of the need for infant-toddler playgrounds has led to the construction of playscapes for children two years and younger.Sue C. Wortham is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, at San Antonio.     

Squishing Circuits: Circuitry Learning with Electronics and Playdough in Early Childhood

While circuitry lessons have traditionally been first introduced in late elementary school, they remain challenging conceptually for undergraduates in physics and engineering courses. Seeking to provide a higher quality and earlier introduction to circuitry learning for young children (ages 3–5), this paper investigates the affordances of utilizing the Squishy Circuits toolkit, a circuitry kit that combines circuit components and playdough, as a first introduction. Our study engaged 45 children across three nursery school classrooms in open-ended play with Squishy Circuits toolkits for seven sessions over a period of 2 weeks. Here, we focus on six children in one focal classroom in order to illustrate the concepts that children are developing during play and open exploration with the kits and a range of crafting materials. Findings indicated that the Squishy Circuits toolkit enabled children to explore concepts important to circuitry learning, including current flow, polarity, and connections. Additionally, analysis of whole class conversations before and after the circuitry explorations indicated significant gains in children’s ability to discuss circuitry concepts over the course of the study. Through individual case studies, we illustrate how children enacted these concepts through their play and how the transparency afforded by the toolkit make the big ideas of circuitry visible. This work serves to illustrate how very young children can successfully begin to engage with science topics commonly introduced in later elementary school when those topics are framed through play and discovery with transparent and malleable materials.

     

Bridging a Cultural Divide Between Play and Learning: Parental Ethnotheories of Young Children’s Play and Their Instantiation in Contemporary China

Research Findings: The current study explored the ethnotheories of 6 Chinese families regarding their young children’s play in Shanghai, the most Westernized metropolis in China. A triangulation of multiple data sources was established through in-depth interviews, home visit observations, and 1-week recordings of child’s daily play activities. The empirical evidence revealed that the 6 families practiced eduplay (Rao & Li, 2009) with their young children, a Chinese version of play-based learning or a compromise between contemporary Western notions of child-centered play and the Chinese tradition of adult-directed academic training. Albeit with individual differences and varieties, parents’ ethnotheories were instantiated in the child’s daily settings for the provision of toys, the use of time in play and learning, and parents’ roles in the child’s play. However, some contextual constraints and barriers prevented the parents from fully putting the imported progressive educational beliefs into action. Practice or Policy: The changing and varying parental ethnotheories of play may reflect a paradigm shift in the early childhood education system, which has been jointly shaped by traditional Chinese beliefs and contemporary Western notions of appropriate practice. More implications of these findings are discussed against the backdrop of sociocultural changes in contemporary Chinese society.     

‘Drawing and playing are not the same’: children’s views on their activities in Icelandic preschools

Play is an important part of early childhood education and has been defined from different perspectives and paradigms. However, definitions of play have been studied more from adults’ perspectives than from those of children themselves. This ethnographic research, with children aged three to five years and built on sociological constructs, will explore children’s views on play in two preschool settings in Iceland. Video-stimulated recordings were used to support children’s conversations about their different activities in the settings, to explore which activities they considered play. Most of the children said that they were playing when they took on roles and could decide what to do with the material. When the children were preparing the play or were drawing, they usually said they were not playing. These findings add to the understanding of play from children’s perspectives and are valuable to the research field and for educators working with young children.     

Approche constructiviste en pédagogie: Décentration et anticipation dans des jeux socio-moteurs

In the constructivist theory, development is the result of an internal process carried on by an individual in interaction with his environment. In the steps of many psychologists and after Piaget in particular, it has been assumed that play contributed to the developmental process of children. This, with regard to the cognitive process, but also to the sociocognitive and motor processes as well. In fact, Kamii and Devriès (1980), when they studied play in young children groups made it clear that children proceed from a self-centered point of view to a conception where several points of view are concerned. This constructivist perspective has been ours when we carried out a pedagogical experiment with 10 years old children of a primary school, using collective play situations for the children to attain a content unknown to them. In this particular sociomotor context, this type of pedagogical approach has been experimented during six sessions with an experimental group of fifteen children. Analysis of the processes of decentration from object and from social object and anticipation has been carried on by means of sociomotor indicators during observation before and after experimentation in the experimental group and in a control group of thirteen children. A greater improvement of both processes was ascertained in the first group and the chosen sociomotor indicators looked like a most appropriate instrument for analysis.     

Understanding playful pedagogies,play narratives and play spaces

This paper is a tentative attempt to unwrap and understand one aspect of playful practice and the influences which determine its existence in early years settings. ‘Storying’ events, those occasions when teachers and children together ‘make up’ stories or parts of stories, develop roles or co‐construct fantasies, occur moment by moment in some settings and with some teachers. Understanding the place of such playful pedagogies at a moment in history when both curriculum content and teaching methods are the focus of considerable political dominance is also important. This paper will consider both the nature of storying events and the nature of the practice in which storying is allowed to occur. Influences on teaching will be examined, including architecture and play spaces, politics and policy, as well as the idea that storying with children is possibly intuitive practice. The notion that teachers' own values and principles have a key role to play in making and shaping pedagogical choices will also be considered. The term ‘teacher’ has been used in an inclusive way to encompass all those adults working in educational settings with young children.     

Teaching English Vocabulary to Elementary Mexican American Students in South Texas: Some Responsive Modern Instructional Strategies

Teaching reading and vocabulary to Mexican American children in the United States of America today requires an acknowledgment of historical social injustice that continues to affect many communities in South Texas. This article debriefs some vocabulary teaching strategies—such as mnemonics and game play under the learning centers perspective—that proved to be highly responsive to Mexican American elementary students' learning styles in South Texas according to our after-school reading practices. Discussion on basic sitz im leben for implementation is framed from the culturally responsive and anti-oppressive approaches.     

Social Understanding in Young Israeli-Jewish,Israeli-Palestinian,Palestinian, and Jordanian Children: Moral Judgments and Stereotypes

Research Findings: An empirical investigation was conducted to test young Palestinian, Jordanian, Israeli-Palestinian, and Israeli-Jewish children's (N = 433; M = 5.7 years of age) cultural stereotypes and their evaluations of peer intergroup exclusion based upon a number of different factors, including being from a different country and speaking a different language. Children in this study lived in a geographical region that has a history of cultural and religious tension, violence, and extreme intergroup conflict. Our findings reveal that the negative consequences of living with intergroup tension are related to the use of stereotypes. At the same time, the results for moral judgments and evaluations about excluding peers provide positive results about the young children's inclusive views regarding peer interactions. Practice: These findings indicate that practitioners working with young children should focus on inclusion in peer contexts. Curricula, media, and social intervention programs must begin in early childhood before children begin to use stereotypes in peer situations, particularly when children from other cultural and ethnic backgrounds play together.