From 2005–8 the Mangere Bridge Kindergarten Centre of Innovation research project investigated the transition between early childhood education and school. The research team developed and researched a range of strategies for supporting children’s learning as the children and their families “crossed the border” from early childhood education to school. This article summarises some of ...

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can open up amazing possibilities for early childhood learning, extending children’s worlds and helping them to expand and explore their thinking. Or, it can be an expensive way to teach the same things in the same way as before. Ann Hatherly argues that it’s not the hardware and software ...

Jeanette Clarkin-Phillips and Margaret Carr examine how establishing a Parent Support and Development Centre at a kindergarten strengthened relationships with families and created new learning opportunities for children, parents and whānau.

Wadestown Kindergarten’s Centre of Innovation project investigated multimodal literacies and their roles in communicative competence and meaning. This article explores the powerful insights into children’s literacies that emerged from finding out about the “funds of knowledge” families hold about their child.

In the 1940s New Zealand government reports and policy about early childhood education were written with the assumption that parents were part of a nuclear family consisting of mother, father and children; an assumption that excludes or marginalises families with lesbian or gay parents. Alex Gunn looks at how official writing has changed over ...

This article describes the journey of a Māori early childhood centre towards an assessment framework that embeds Māori epistemologies, ideas of valued learning and cultural norms and understandings.

In the first edition of Politics in the Playground, Dr Helen May chronicled the ups and downs of early childhood in postwar New Zealand, including both periods of significant growth and change. She deftly wove an historical and cultural narrative of attitudes, ideas, events, campaigns, personalities and policies related ...

Te Whāriki has two indicative learning outcomes: dispositions and working theories. The notion of dispositions has been explored extensively over the past few years, but the concept of working theories has remained obscure. This article begins to redress this situation. It looks at how children develop and refine their working theories about the ...