People often think about art as creating something beautiful—a replica Starry Night collage or a seasonal craft to serve as a gift. But when children engage in process art, they explore and experience materials without working toward a particular goal.
The following DAP snapshot and reflection touches on how one teacher responded to children’s marks on paper, encouraging creativity and integrated learning, particularly around drawing, writing, and storytelling.
In make-believe play, young children are actively engaged with peers and are in control: it is the children—not an adult—who make decisions during play.
Authored by
Authored by:
Barbara Wilder-Smith, Deborah J. Leong, Elena Bodrova
Art is important to the development of young children’s physical and cognitive skills and their aesthetic awareness. Examples of children’s creative expressions often fill early childhood settings. But what about appreciating visual art?
In this article, we describe how early childhood educators can purposefully plan for and scaffold vocabulary learning during open-ended art activities.
In this article, Mimi Brodsky Chenfield shares reflections from her experiences and conversations with children across the early childhood years—each of which builds to a major shift, moving from STEM to STEAM.
You don’t need to be a musician to use music comfortably, confidently, and creatively with children. Here are eight ways to make it an integral part of your classroom.
To create a community building event with family involvement, we decided to engage in a Cardboard Challenge focused on trees: How could children build a tree with cardboard-like materials and make it interactive?
his article describes the collaboration between teachers and researchers designing a translanguaging space where bilingual children and their families could explore the linguistic and cultural practices that they engage in at home.
Authored by
Authored by:
Ivana Espinet, Maite T. Sánchez, Sabrina Poms, Elizabeth Menendez
In this article, we discuss the benefits of engaging children in math learning through shared reading, outlining strategies that early childhood educators can use to extend the math during shared reading of both mathematical and non-mathematical books.
Authored by
Authored by:
Megan Onesti, Colleen Uscianowski, Michèle M. Mazzocco
In this article, we discuss the role of contrasting cases when introducing mathematical concepts to young children, especially with regard to integers, the various uses of the minus sign, and number operations.
Teachers can help children build the foundations of algebraic reasoning in preschool and elementary school by focusing on topics critical to algebra by using concrete objects found in any early learning setting or home and by offering simple activities.