Early years

Age-appropriate consent education will be mandatory in all Australian schools from 2023. Kit and Arlo Find a Way: Teaching consent to 8-12 year olds is a fictional chapter book created for use in primary classrooms. In the first instalment of a two-part Q&A with author-educators Ingrid Laguna and Vanessa Hamilton, we find out more about the resource and research about the impact of consent education in schools.

Home support of children’s literacy skills in the early years is a well-known indicator of their reading progress at the start of school. A new study has explored how different reading experiences at home have an impact on children’s continued reading development at school.

Taking turns and sharing in early childhood develops children’s pro-social skills in the early years, helping them to thrive in school and later life. In the second part of a Q&A with Teacher, Lauren Armstrong – Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of Tasmania – discusses how early years and primary teachers can support the development of these important skills.

Taking turns and sharing in early childhood develops children’s pro-social skills in the early years, helping them to thrive in school and later life. In the first instalment of a two-part Q&A, we speak with Lauren Armstrong – Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of Tasmania – about the impact of these skills for school readiness, and the current research on the topic.

Phillippa Adgemis is Principal at Coldstream Primary School – one of the six schools highlighted in a recent Australian study exploring the common features of exemplary school playgroups. In this article, she shares more about how the playgroup is run, and the effect it has had on the school.

Children’s experiences inform the development of their vocabulary and, subsequently, how they view the world around them. As we head into the third year of pandemic challenges and restrictions, interesting themes have continued to emerge through students’ writing.

The transition to primary school is a big step for children and families, and there are many things to consider for educators supporting students in their transition to school. In this article, we outline five further readings that examine successful transitions.

School playgroups benefit children, their families, schools and communities. New Australian research has identified six key features of high-performing school playgroups.

Little J, Big Cuz and their teacher Miss Chen are heading back to class for a third season of their Logie-award winning animated children’s series, which supports the transition from home to school for Indigenous children and their families.

Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, joins The Research Files this month to talk about the Childhood Nature Play study. We’ll be chatting about the different types of nature play, and the teaching and learning resources that have been co-designed as a result of the research project.