This article explores the pedagogy of New Zealand early childhood teachers who have consciously adopted ideas from the early childhood programme of the Italian city of Reggio Emilia. It follows the learning experiences of children involved in a project investigating cows, milking and dairy processing that emerged from children’s interests related to Chinese New ...

The transition into early childhood education is a big step for children and their parents. It can help a child settle in if one teacher becomes their “primary caregiver”, giving them someone to relate to and the parents someone to communicate with. This action research project looks at one centre’s “key teacher” system and ...

Education settings are one of the key points of contact new migrants have with their host society, so the way early childhood teachers negotiate multiculturalism is important. This article is based on a study from Australia, one of the most multicultural nations on Earth. It examines how, in implementing equality by treating new-migrant families ...

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.