Offers ways for early childhood and elementary teachers to explore a family's use of and priorities for literacy. Includes ethnographic vignettes emphasizing strategies for viewing families neutrally and avoiding assumptions and judgment. Asserts that to understand the family's literacy experiences and priorities will more closely connect…

Uses narrative to exemplify young children's learning of mathematics. Presents a model of a supportive classroom emphasizing discourse, agency, and authorship through participatory and reflective practices. Identifies features of such a classroom and uses narratives from 5-year-olds to explore their authoring, sense-making, collaborating, and how…

The frame analytical approach was used to explore the frames through which nine Finnish educators in early childhood programs interpret their working situations. Findings indicated that the educators interpreted their work through five different frames: educational, caring, managing, practical, and personal. Frames provided the rules and…

This qualitative evaluation study explored the active classroom practices that early years teachers adopt when they introduce kindergartners to science in Greece. Findings indicated a considerable gap between the proposed and implemented curriculum. Findings also identified a number of factors that were not optimal and confirmed that early years…

Deconstructs case studies of parents' and teachers' experiences as children started child care. Argues that mothers and teachers defined their roles against the background of dominant societal discourses about motherhood and early childhood teaching. However, while teachers spoke about themselves as less powerful than mothers in influencing…

This study examined factors influencing the adjustment of children to the first year of school at four elementary schools in Australia. Statistically significant associations with children's adjustment were found for several factors, including personal and background factors, transition activities conducted by schools, children's preschool and…

Provides an overview of the principles and framework of Te Whaariki, the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, and of subsequent assessment and evaluation research. Presents the framework of "Learning and Teaching Stories," a user-friendly approach to assessment and self-evaluation, used in action research in three regions of New Zealand.…

Describes features of the concept of involvement, or quality of a child's activity, and a training package for observing children's involvement at child care centers. Recounts use of Leuven Involvement Scales to examine activities of over 600 children in 8 German child care centers. Findings reveal the prevalence of sex-typed activity preferences…

Teachers' role in the conflicts of 2- and 3-year-olds was examined in Dutch and Finnish child care centers. Data suggested that teachers indirectly influenced conflict occurrence and seriousness by their organization of time, space, and materials. Two types of equally used teacher interventions were distinguished: mediating strategies and high…

This study documented one child's development of conflict resolution skills when a peer problem-solving model was used in a constructivist-designed classroom. Findings revealed that this child progressed from a power assertion style of conflict resolution to a more sophisticated form of negotiation. The study supports current thinking that young…

Examined the types of play and social interactions in which nine preschoolers with disabilities engaged while at their chosen learning/activity centers in an inclusive program. Found individual differences in the amount of time spent in various centers, the number of different types of play engaged in, and in the amount of time spent in play of…

Examined English-speaking preschoolers' level of writing and their performance on oral-segmentation tasks. Found a close relationship between children's levels of writing and their levels of oral segmentation on a writing task in which they were asked to write four pairs of words, for example, "ham" and "hamster." Concluded that children's…

This study compared the writing mediation style of low SES mothers on home-like and school-like writing activities with their kindergartners. Analysis of videotaped interactions indicated that although mothers had a general cross-activity strategy of mediating writing, different writing contexts resulted in different maternal behaviors. The…

Used a quasi-experimental approach to examine whether exposure to age-appropriate books in their native language would affect pre-literacy skills development of language minority kindergartners. Found that native Spanish-speaking children exposed to Spanish-language books scored significantly higher on a pre-literacy skills tests than did their…

Compared the thinking of kindergartners and sixth-graders as expressed in unassisted retellings of a narrative text. Found no significant age differences in retelling lengths and few significant age differences in the amount of types of thinking. Older children tended to summarize paragraphs and single sentences; young children tended to summarize…