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This book offers step-by-step guidance to help busy practitioners create meaningful role play that will delight young children, enhance learning and link to the Early Learning Goals. The role play scenarios have been carefully created so that children can identify with them and will be excited and eager to join in. They give children the opportunity to play freely, to discover and develop at their own pace and to link directly to the Early Learning Goals and beyond. This Book shows practitioners exactly how to plan, organize and implement role play activities. The activities have been tried, tested and enjoyed in the busy nursery where the author works. The book also divides the play scenarios into the DfES stated area of learning (personal, social, emotional, communication, language and literacy, mathematical, knowledge of the world, creative and physical) allowing practitioners to choose activities to suit their needs. The book includes: step-by-step guidance; photographs and plans; a list of easily obtained and inexpensive play equipment; and a planning template for practitioners to develop their own ideas. It should prove useful to teachers and assistants from nursery classes up to key stage 1.
Stories from oral traditions from a variety of historical, cultural and world sources, with story sources and resources for families.
Stories from oral traditions from a variety of historical, cultural and geographical sources, arranged by year group, fully indexed with an introduction explaining how to use the Collection.
The Practical Guidance in the Early Years Foundation Stage series will assist practitioners in the smooth and successful implementation of the Early Years Foundation Stage. Each book gives clear and detailed explanations of each aspect of Learning and Development and encourages readers to consider each area within its broadest context to expand and develop their own knowledge and good practice. Practical ideas and activities for all age groups are offered along with a wealth of expertise of how elements from the practice guidance can be implemented within all early years settings. The books include suggestions for the innovative use of everyday ressources, popular books and stories. This book offers an in-depth understanding of children's thinking skills from a psychological perspective. The book introduces the Learning Tools model, a vital cognitive tool used by children to learn and solve problems, and gives practical ideas on how practitioners can use everyday materials to promote problem solving and early numeracy skills through play. Readers are encouraged to reflect on their own practice and understanding to help them provide learning opportunities to meet the unique needs of all children in their setting.
The impact of training or experience is not the same at all points in development. Children who receive music lessons, or learn a second language before age 7-8 are more proficient as adults. Early exposure to drugs or trauma makes people more likely to become addicted or depressed later life. Rat pups exposed to specific frequencies from 9-13 days post-partum show expanded cortical representations of these frequencies. Young birds must hear and copy their native song within 1-2 months of birth or they may never learn it at all. These are examples of sensitive periods: developmental windows where maturation and specific experience interact to produce differential long-term effects on the brain and behavior. While still controversial, evidence for the existence of sensitive periods has grown, as has our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of brain plasticity. Behavioral evidence from studies of language, psychopathology or vision in humans has been complemented by evidence elucidating molecular, gene and hormonal mechanisms in animals. It has been proposed that sensitive periods can be both opened and closed by specific experience, and that there are multiple, overlapping sensitive periods that occur through-out development as functions come on line. It is also likely that experience-dependent behavioral or brain plasticity accrued during one sensitive period can serve as a scaffold on which later experience and plasticity can build. Based on current knowledge, there are a number of broad questions and challenges to be addressed in this domain, these include: generating new information about the neurobiological mediators of structural and functional changes; proposing models of brain development that will better predict when sensitive periods should occur and what functions are implicated; investigation of the interaction between experience during a sensitive period and pre-existing individual differences; and the relationship between experience during a sensitive period and on-going experience. The goal of this Research Topic is to bring together scientists in different fields whose work addresses these issues, including animal and human developmental neuroscience, language and cognitive development, education, developmental psychopathology and sensory neuroscience.
