2017
During this year’s NAIDOC week, 3 to 9 July, early childhood education and care services take the opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. In making the most of this opportunity, they reflect on the week, and devise ways to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture in the life of […]
The theme for this year’s National Reconciliation Week is ‘Let’s Take the Next Steps’. National Reconciliation Week is especially significant, this year, because it marks the celebration of two major milestones in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, namely, 27 May, the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum, and 3 June, the twenty-fifth anniversary of […]
For many in our industry, packing up and clearing away the myriad of things, which children may have used in a play session, functions as a time where children are learning responsibility, cooperation and self-regulation. However, there are more opportunities for learning and development in packing up and clearing away than just these social/emotional domain […]
Epigenetics and transgenerational inheritance – the next developmental psychology breakthrough, or is it bunkum? Recent research proposes that what we experience in our lifetime can modify our DNA, and that these changes can be passed on to future generations. Whilst a lot of attention is on the human genome, it is apparent, at least to […]
The frequency of reading to children at a young age has been proven, by a study undertaken in 2013, by Guyonne Kalb and Jan C. van Ours, to be a directly causative factor on their learning outcomes, when they go on to school, irrespective of their family backgrounds and home environments. The research, the outcome […]
One of the two Melbourne dailies featured an article in its Sunday edition, which announced the launch of a new book, The Me, Me, Me, Epidemic, by US parenting expert Amy McCready. When the book was previously ‘launched’ in August, 2015, the author was quoted as saying “Overly involved parents helicopter over their kids’ every […]
According to neuroscientists, the development of handwriting skills is a crucial part of a child’s development. Our brains are hard-wired to learn language, in both its written and spoken forms. However, as we depend more and more on communicating in text, via computers, mobile phones and iPads, some educators are questioning whether handwriting has a […]
A central concept within social and emotional learning is the idea of the development of a child’s sense of self. But what is a ‘self’? What does the ‘self’ do? Do we actually experience this thing in ourselves as a self, or, when we’re in different social contexts, do we feel ourselves to be different […]
ADHD is getting quite a run in NT&C’s blog posts. So far, we have looked at the role played by the mother’s diet during gestation and discussed the idea that the child with ADHD does not deliberately choose to behave as they do. This, the third on the topic of ADHD, looks at the seemingly […]