This series is aimed particularly at early years practitioners, trainers and researchers, with the intention of providing discussions of some of the most recent and relevant research findings, in order to foster evidence-based practice in the rapidly expanding field of early childhood education and care. The contributions to the texts come from internationally renowned writers with experience and expertise in practical as well as academic settings, who are able to offer critical analyses of the research findings they present. The series focuses mainly on the years from birth to six and the research themes reviewed range from those with policy level and macro-issues foci to 'intra-child' questions. Overall, the series explores different perspectives, viewing research issues concerning within-child differences in their contexts, and acknowledging the impact of cultural expectations and constructions of childhood in our complex and diverse global society.

Studying for an Early Childhood Degree, based on the practices of The Pen Green Centre for children and families, exemplifies how student-practitioners can foster strong communities of learners and create student-teacher connections that remain long after studies are complete. The Pen Green Early Childhood Centre in Corby, UK, has developed a unique approach to adult education. Highly qualified tutors, with their wide-ranging experiences, have written Studying for an Early Childhood Degree in collaboration with current and former students. It illustrates different ways to complete assignments, providing 20 case-studies of work that achieved an excellent grade from students of different professional, geographical, ethnic, educational and socio-economic backgrounds; it also explores the rationale behind what contributed to these excellent final grades. Each chapter, linked to the key themes of the QAA Early Childhood Studies degree, includes discussions, reflections, commentary and extracts from students' works through Levels 4-7, as well as suggestions for further reading. Studying for an Early Childhood Degree is an essential read for learners as well as educators and practitioners. It will be a key resource for students having varied learning needs, professional heritages, writing styles and interests. Further, it will also support other educators to consider the unique and often competing demands of being an adult in higher education.

Play is a magnificent activity that sustains life and promotes joy and hopefulness. Loose Parts for Children with Diverse Abilities addresses the importance of play while providing appropriate accommodation to support young children with diverse abilities. Award-winning author and educator Miriam Beloglovsky advocates for play for play sake and invites early childhood educators and families to see children with diverse abilities' strengths, recognize them as capable, competent and creative, and listen to their powerful voices. With hundreds of illustrative full-color photographs and infused with real stories of children with diverse abilities engaged in loose parts play, the book also includes narrative comments from families and educators.

A guide for self-reflection and managing your emotions when young children seek attention. Attention seeking is seen as misbehavior in young children, and giving them the attention they need is often times interpreted as reinforcement of bad behavior. Everyone Needs Attention focuses on how we, as adults, manage our emotions when children seek our attention, including a how-to chapter to help the reader reflect about how they sought out attention as children. This book includes conversations with teachers as well as some concrete steps to assist in self-explorations. Tamar Jacobson, PhD, includes her own life story of suffering emotional neglect, as well as anecdotes of her work with teachers, families, and children over the past forty years as a preschool teacher, professor, mother, and early childhood consultant.

During the preschool and kindergarten years, children begin spending more time engaging in physical activity and exploring new foods. Help children learn how to take care of their bodies as they build a foundation for healthy, active lives with this "Fitness and Nutrition" curriculum. Children will learn about motor development, fitness and physical activity, rest and relaxation, food choices and eating habits, and avoiding germs when eating.
The curriculum includes
Overviews of the six fitness and nutrition topics
Suggested interest area materials and supports for creating the learning environment
Learning objectives and vocabulary words to introduce and use
Suggestions for evaluating children's understanding of each topic
More than 30 hands-on classroom activities
Family information and take-home activities
This book is part of the Growing, Growing Strong series, a whole-health curriculum for children age three though kindergarten. Together, the books provide a complete set of activities and resources to help you support children's growth and wellness.

This volume on literacy in early childhood education covers topics such as: teachers' roles in promoting literacy-related play; hypermediating literacy activity; creating opportunities for discourse; bridging home and school literacy; and engaging children in the appropriation of literacy.

This pioneering volume provides a thorough understanding of children’s spirituality from a holistic development perspective and explores the ways early childhood educators can nurture spirituality in the secular classroom. Making a critical distinction between spirituality and religion, this book draws on conceptual and empirical research, as well as authentic classroom vignettes to explore how theory translates into practice. Inviting readers to examine how their beliefs inform their practices, Children’s Spirituality in Early Childhood Education offers a purposeful window into supporting children’s learning and development with a focus on their souls, making it important reading for teachers, teacher candidates, researchers, and teacher educators in the field of early childhood education.

This book sheds light on new research related to welfare state, child care policies, and small children's everyday lives in instuitutions in a variety of countries. In uniting recent social childhood research, welfare perspectives and historical and comparative approaches, the book explores institutionalization as a feature of modern child life.

When it comes to science, many of today's children experience narrow and impoverished learning opportunities, which, as professor Judah Schwartz writes in the preface to this book, lead ultimately to a mere caricature of science. As a curative to this prevalent and unfortunate situation, this well-written and thought-provoking book presents the state of the art in science education for kindergarten and primary schools. It begins with a thorough theoretical discussion on why it is incumbent on the science educator to teach science already at first stages of childhood. It goes on to analyze and synthesize a broad range of educational approaches and themes such as: inquiry-based teaching; learning through authentic problems; scaffolding; situated learning; learning through projects; non-verbal knowledge; and informal learning.

Class-based self-perception is a rising issue worldwide. Through observation in kindergartens in Fiji, Brison examines how schools instil these ideas in Suva children. Teachers have different goals depending on the social background of the families while students create friendships through shared experience of toys, gender roles, and mass media.

Making Meaning is a synthesis of theory, research, and practice that explicitly presents art as a meaning making process.

This book provokes readers to examine their current understandings of language, literacy and learning through the lens of the various arts-based perspectives offered in this volume; provides a starting point for constructing broader, multimodal views of what it might mean to "make meaning"; and underscores why understanding arts-based learning as a meaning-making process is especially critical to early childhood education in the face of narrowly-focused, test-driven curricular reforms. Each contributor integrates this theory and research with stories of how passionate teachers, teacher-educators, and pre-service teachers, along with administrators, artists, and professionals from a variety of fields have transcended disciplinary boundaries to engage the arts as a meaning-making process for young children and for themselves.

Young Children Learning Through Schemas is a creative and highly engaging text that shows how young children can learn through exploring repeated patterns in their actions. With contributions from a range of practitioners, this book examines the philosophical approaches underpinning constructivism and includes a variety of case studies of small children in order to demonstrate the universal explorations we all engage in as human beings. This approach from the contributors, which involves presenting observations of one or two young children per chapter, is engaging, inspirational and yet rooted in every day practice. Chapters include a variety of observations of young children at home, in nursery and in groups with their parents or carers, which continue the dialogue about early years practice and the roles of families and professionals. Containing a wealth of illustrative photos, any practitioner researching or working in the area of Early Years education and care will find this book essential reading.

Mission Statement: The mission of the series is to provide an integrated view of current knowledge within the various areas of early childhood education. Each volume in the series will present a scholarly, but accessible review of research and theory related to some aspect of early childhood education. The topics to be covered in each volume will be determined by which aspects of the field are considered particularly important at the time of its development as well as which are particularly generative in relation to current research and theory.

Agreements concerning inter-institutional rules in the treaties of the European Union often give rise to reactions and processes of adaptation within the EU institutions. Recent literature on EU legislative politics has increasingly examined decision-making within the EU institutions, but has largely overlooked how these internal processes react and adapt to changes in relations between the EU bodies. To fill this gap the authors present a series of empirical studies that examine how shifts in inter-institutional rules and procedures affect intra-institutional politics. They show that the resulting intrainstitutional adaptations may in turn both have distributive consequences and affect the efficiency of the initial inter-institutional reforms. In addition, they provide some stepping stones for theory-building on how treaty reforms affect organizational structure and decision-making within the EU institutions by outlining a series of mediating variables that link these two types of change processes.

This book was originally published as a special issue of West European Politics.

Take the uncertainty out of teaching science to young children with this comprehensive curriculum framework that aligns with national early learning standards. Enjoy over 100 interactive activities guaranteed to encourage children to explore the wonders of their world. Each activity includes background scientific information for teachers, a guide to implementation, and children's typical responses for stress-free science fun.

The professionalism of the early childhood sector has gained prominence on the policy agendas of many countries. National pedagogical frameworks or curricula and an upsurge of pathways to gaining or upgrading qualifications has led to a pervasive terminology of professionalism. Yet, despite the pervasiveness of this terminology, the question of what professionalism means in early years contexts remains open to debate. This book draws together the work of an international group of scholars who have engaged with this question. They ask: How can professionalism be conceptualised in early childhood settings? How might one act professionally in increasingly diverse and changing social and cultural contexts? Do we have a common ground of understanding about these terms? Are there key concepts that can be agreed upon? Drawing on research and experience across a wide range of national contexts, this book seeks an understanding of early childhood professionalism in local contexts that might throw light on the global implications of this term. This book was published as a special issue in the European Early Childhood Education Research Journal.

One of the few Reggio Emilia books focused on the infant and toddler years, "The Diary of Laura" is a powerful tool for early childhood students and professionals. This beautifully designed book reflects the Reggio Emilia commitment to artistic endeavors through the unique documentation of one child's growth in an infant-toddler program in Reggio Emilia, Italy. An assemblage of affectionately written notes and photographs, "Story of Laura," the original diary, details the progression of young Laura's growth and milestones in the program and offers a unique perspective on her early child care experience. First published in Italian in 1983, the diary is now available for the first time in English. Beautifully presented, "The Diary of Laura" includes a reproduction of the original diary next to the authorized English translation. Many readers familiar with the Reggio Emilia approach will recognize the last entry--Laura's notable discoveries about a watch. "The Diary of Laura "includes new photos and reflective essays by recognized Reggio Emilia experts from around the world, including Carolyn Edwards, Carlina Rinaldi, J. Ronald Lally, Pat Wharton, Jan Millikan, Moonja Oh, and Harold Gothson.

Using interviews gathered from program directors across the country with over 700 years of combined experience, this book is a comprehensive guide to becoming the best director you can be. Combined with current research and best practices you will find realistic real-time solutions to address the most common struggles faced by program administrators today.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive review of the burgeoning literature on theory of mind (TOM) after the preschool years and the first to integrate this literature with other approaches to the study of social understanding. By highlighting the relationship between early and later developments, the book provides readers with a greater understanding of what we know and what we still need to know about higher-order TOM. Although the focus is on development in typical populations, development in individuals with autism and in older adults is also explored to give readers a deeper understanding of possible problems in development.

Examining the later developments of TOM gives readers a greater understanding of:

• Developments that occur after the age of 5.
• Individual differences in rate of development and atypical development and the effects of those differences.
• The differences in rate of mastery which become more marked, and therefore more informative, with increased age.
• What it means to have a good theory of mind.
• The differences between first- and second- order theory of mind development in preschoolers, older children, adolescents, and adults.
• The range of beliefs available to children at various ages, providing a fuller picture of what is meant by understanding of belief.
  

After the introduction, the literature on first-order developments during the preschool period is summarized to serve as a backdrop for understanding more advanced developments. Chapter 3 is devoted to the second-order false belief task. Chapters 4 and 5 introduce a variety of other measures for understanding higher-level forms of TOM thereby providing readers with greater insight into other cognitive and social developmental outcomes. Chapter 6 discusses the relation between children s TOM abilities and other aspects of their development. Chapters 7 and 8 place the work in a historical context. First, the research on the development of social and mental worlds that predated the emergence of TOM is examined. Chapter 8 then provides a comparative treatment of the two literatures and how they complement one another.

Ideal as a supplement in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in theory of mind, cognitive development, or social development taught in psychology and education. Veteran researchers will also appreciate this book s unique synthesis of this critical research.

This book does not cover the whole field of Infants' Teaching but is concerned mainly with general principles and matters which are open to the non-specialist. Some technical subjects such as Physical Education have been omitted but nonetheless the volume provides a thorough (if somewhat dated) introduction to early years education in the first half of the twentieth century.

Published long before the importance of early childhood education was formally recognised in the educational landscape this book explores the significance of play for young children. The volume includes an appendix on Montessori education.

First published in 2012. Mini-set C: Early Childhood Education re-issues 5 volumes originally published between 1913 and 1992. Over that period, but particularly in the last 4 decades, educational policy makers have become increasingly aware of the importance of early childhood education. There are many perspectives for viewing early childhood education, and the volumes in this mini-set reflect this.

How can teachers ensure that the transition from the Early Years Foundation Stage to Key Stage One is a positive experience for children? What are the issues for children, parents and teachers and how should teachers respond to these? This book introduces the concept of transition and identifies the key problem areas for children and adults focusing on the differences in philosophy and practice between the EYFS and Key Stage One, whilst also giving emphasis to the opportunities that are provided by the transition process.It stresses the need for a balanced approach and the importance of sustained shared thinking from the EYFS through Key Stage One and provides practical strategies for achieving this. Onwards and Upwards: Supporting the Transition to Key Stage One includes detailed guidance on: preparing for the transition to Key Stage One the role of the teacher the balance between adult-led and child initiated activity play and the use of the outdoor environment creating a stimulating environment that supports a balanced approach Throughout the book, Kathleen Orlandi emphasises the child's perspective and draws on naturalistic observations of children before, during and after a period of transition. With case studies, key quotes from children, examples of practice and suggestions for planning, and questions for reflective practice, this textbook will be invaluable for students and practitioners in the EYFS and Key Stage One, as well as those responsible for CPD.

Beginning with descriptions of the ways in which children make sense of their experience and the world, such as fantasy, stories and games, Egan constructs his argument that constituting this foundational layer are sets of cultural sense-making capacities, reflected in oral cultures throughout the world. Egan sees education as the acquisition of these sets of sense-making capacities, available in our culture, and his goal is to conceptualize primary education in a way that over comes the dichotomy between progressivisim and traditionalism, attending both the needs of the individual child and the accumulation of knowledge.