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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Schools spend huge amounts of time producing school reports which are one of the main vehicles for communicating students’ progress to parents. The writers investigated a series of school reports and looked at the nature of the information contained in them. They make a number of suggestions about how reports ...

Most of the ideas and concepts that underpin environmental education have developed outside the school education system. This article draws on a recent review of New Zealand and international literature to examine the origin and evolution of environmental education and points to opportunities for the provision of learning experiences that ...

Recently we have been hearing a great deal about something called the “knowledge society”. What is all this about, and why hasn’t there been much discussion of the educational implications of participation in this “new” society? Jane Gilbert explores some of the issues.
 

Which learning experiences promote proportional reasoning? Here is a piece of equipment which can be integrated into lessons when dealing with ideas involving fractions, decimals, and percentages.

The focus of this article is the strategies that young children use to find the volume of rectangular prisms. Children were observed during teaching sessions and their solutions to follow-up assessment tasks were analysed. Some implications for the teaching of volume to young children are presented.