PictureBook Plays

This article I came across this week about the lack of physical activity in preschools reminded me that I’ve been doing some thinking about my daughter’s car time.  She’s an active three year-old and, like all three year olds, is at her best when she’s been running around and playing outside for a better part [...]

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.
Albert Einstein

On Thursday, as promised, we presented a small portion of our pedagogy at naeyc.  A very small portion.  With only an hour and with so much potential material, it was really hard to figure out what to include.  We ended up focusing on the actual creation of the picturebook play and using it as a [...]

In the world of early childhood, science is presented to children as both process and content.*  Process skills are seen as how children learn, while content is what children learn.  Through experiences presented via a process methodology, children learn concrete information.  Remember, for example, the celery stalk in the glass of red food coloring experiment?  [...]

My three year old daughter’s ability to create a dramatic story has just taken an exciting leap.  I wanted to share what can happen when a child’s innate creative spirit is guided along.
The scene went something like this:
Black Cat: Meow.
Mama: Oh, hello kitty.
Black Cat: I’m a kitten in the water.  Meow.
Mama: Oh, little kitten.  What [...]

What does Halloween have to do with children’s play, and PictureBook Plays?   As adults “take over” the American version of a holiday with origins in pagan rites and religious observances, how do we make sense of it for young children?  Mildren Parton, in 1932, gave the early childhood field one of the first definitions of [...]

The New York Times just published a really interesting article about Sesame Street in Israel and Palestine.  It’s predominantly a story of first attempting to create a joint show where Israeli and Palestinian Muppets interact regularly but finally producing separate shows due to the realization that the cultures just aren’t ready to promote to their [...]

There’s a new study out demonstrating that children under three can’t learn new action words by watching television programs unless there is an adult around to “interact with them and support their learning.”
You can read the whole story here.
To be honest, this doesn’t really surprise me.  Children under three are still learning to understand the [...]

I discovered an interesting article a while back concerning the Royal Shakespeare Company of Stratford-Upon-Avon, England.
Now, theatre artists in the U.S. have an unusually encompassing love of the Bard, but they really love him in England.  It is, after all, the place of his birth.  And how proud they are that their country produced such [...]

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
- John F. Kennedy