Early years

In this blog series, Little J & Big Cuz’s Miss Chen shares practical Foundation to Year 2 classroom ideas. In today's activity, her students learn more about natural and processed materials in Foundation Science.  

NAIDOC Week is an annual celebration that honours the cultures, histories and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In today’s article, we explore the 2026 theme 50 Years of Deadly, share links to the free resources that have been developed for teachers, and highlight 3 schools around the country who are celebrating NAIDOC Week in their own unique way. 

Last month, the OECD released findings from the 2025 International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS). In today's episode, Dr Dan Cloney, Senior Research Fellow at ACER and Lead Researcher for IELS, unpacks some of the key findings from the study, explores what made the assessment design unique, and discusses why it's so important to ensure every child arrives at school with the strongest possible foundations.

In this podcast special, Dominique Beech sits down with Dr Dan Edwards, Acting Head of ACER's Student Learning and Progress Division, to talk about the future of assessment. He shares his insights on how assessment can support students at key transition points across K-12, the impact of AI, and more. 

The results from the second cycle of the OECD’s Early Learning and Child Well-being Study (IELS 2025) have just been released. Here we share more about the focus and innovative assessment design of IELS, and an overview of the findings on how children are faring at the very start of their learning journeys.

In today’s podcast, CEO of the Dyslexia-SPELD Foundation and Educational and Developmental Psychologist, Mandy Nayton, joins Teacher’s Dominique Beech to share frameworks to support all students to read successfully. We cover essential phonics knowledge, morphology, vocabulary and word study, and also discuss how to support older students’ literacy skills. 

In early childhood settings, educators often navigate a familiar tension: how to honour children’s play as the foundation of learning while ensuring curriculum expectations are met? In today’s article, early childhood educators Helen Bartlett and Lauren Bastion explain how they built a curriculum-tracking platform that analyses children’s learning stories and generates visual curriculum insights.

Recent research from Edith Cowan University highlights a lack of disability representation in children’s picture books. In today’s article, lead researcher Associate Professor Helen Adam discusses the study findings, and practical advice for K-12 teachers when it comes to selecting books for a school or classroom library.

Do your students count on their fingers for mathematics tasks? Do you encourage them to count on their fingers, or do you focus on supporting them to make calculations mentally? New research from Switzerland suggests finger counting has a positive impact on student outcomes, but only when it’s used at a specific age. 

What strategies do you have to smooth the transition for children in their first year of formal schooling? Students feeling like they belong at school is a key factor, and new research has uncovered what makes young students feel like they belong at school.