Playful learning doesn’t require the latest and greatest toys and technologies. Some of the most valuable learning materials are open-ended items that you probably have at home or can find at little to no cost.
In this article, Jenna Valasek explains how she uses open-ended materials with intentional teacher planning and scaffolding to engage children in active thinking, social interactions, and joyful learning across multiple areas.
Garnett Booker is a pre-K teacher for English Language Learners at Truesdell Elementary School in Washington, DC. He has over 15 years of experience in the early childhood field.
This issue of Teaching Young Children offers articles and features filled with recommended strategies, activities, and materials to connect play and content learning throughout the preschool day.
Teaching Young Children is NAEYC's magazine for anyone who works with preschoolers. Colorful, informative, and easy-to-read, TYC is packed full of teaching ideas, strategies, and tips.
In this article, we explain some of the challenges with classroom pets, then offer alternative, unit-focused approaches that are better for animals, early childhood educators, and children.
In this excerpt of our book The Young Child and Mathematics, third edition, we showcase children’s thinking about data as a teacher engages her preschoolers in a data-centric activity.
Authored by
Authored by:
Angela Chan Turrou, Nicholas C. Johnson, Megan L. Franke
This article pairs books from a variety of social and cultural perspectives with activities that meld literacy and math concepts related to counting, shapes, measurement, classifying, and patterning.
Many early childhood educators do not feel adequately prepared and confident in teaching math. Here are nine ideas you can use to grow in confidence as an intentional math teacher.
The following classroom activity and its home extension include step-by-step instructions and sample questions to promote conversations about spatial orientation to build children’s reasoning processes and spatial terminology.
Use the following tips to build on your preschooler’s math skills—including counting, pattern recognition, and sequencing to solve problems—to support computational thinking.
You can build upon children’s capacity for number composition and decomposition through engaging games and stories and authentic and meaningful experiences.
Authored by
Authored by:
Alissa A. Lange, Hagit Mano, Sylwia Lech , Irena Nayfeld
This month's feature teacher is Curti Dunmore, a preschool teacher at Egenolf Early Childhood Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She has been an early childhood educator for more than 16 years.
