Early Childhood Folio 8 (2004)

This article draws on research that was carried out in a kindergarten and two junior classes in one community. It presents findings about the understandings that mothers have of what and how their young children should be learning in kindergarten, the first year of primary school, and at home.

Centre-based models of early childhood care and education provision dominate the early childhood landscape, and “taken-for-granted” practices tend to reflect centre-based discourse. Home-based early childhood care and education settings challenge many of these common practices. This research documented the lived experiences of children in two exemplary home-based settings in urban New Zealand over 5 days. This article describes and discusses four unique features of… Read more

How do early childhood teachers describe and enact their ideas about the curriculum? Two researchers, one from each side of the Tasman, describe how they have separately attempted to address this question. Despite the differing contexts of their research, the findings of their studies have one overwhelming similarity: early childhood teachers are involved in a constant process of professional discrimination as they draw on their knowledge of theory and practice and… Read more

How are children’s languages, identity, and confidence supported during transitions? This article describes participant research on innovative practices in transition at a Samoan-immersion early childhood “Centre of Innovation”. The research investigates the relationship between learning and language continuity as children and educators make transitions from the point of entry to the centre through to beginning school.

Road safety education for young children requires more than games, rhymes, and worksheets; it needs to be linked to everyday experiences of traffic and addressed “little and often”. This article reports on the experiences of teachers and classes in the first years of school who participated in a national project to develop integrative cross-curricular, essential-skills-based road safety education. Learning and teaching experiences built on three pedagogical… Read more

Early childhood programmes already feature many technological artefacts, such as blocks, collage materials, and construction kits—but is technology education happening in these centres? What dimension of children’s work with these materials turns the activity from “doing” to “designerly thinking”? This article explores the concept of designerly thinking for very young children within the context of recent pedagogical developments in technology education

A description of the development of te arapū Māori—an alphabet naming system for Māori—and its uses in reversing language shift in kōhanga reo.