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A Call For Digital Citizenship Curriculum In Early Childhood Education, Jenna K. Ladd, Joel J. Traver

Essays in Education

Accessibility of information (factual or fabricated), social interconnectedness, and more of our daily lives being lived in the digital world has created challenges and opportunities for children and families around the world. As a result, there exists an emerging need for families with children aged birth-to-five to receive education and support through standards-based digital citizenship curriculum to navigate living online. Several models of digital citizenship curriculum have been created for the K-12 education to provide education and guidance for teachers, administrators, and parents of older children. Thus, we call for the development and implementation of standards-based digital citizenship curriculum in …

Utilizing Counter Narratives To Develop Culturally Sustaining, Critically Conscious Preservice Teacher Practitioners, David Wolff

Essays in Education

The content areas that get most attention in an elementary classroom include mathematics and English/Language Arts (ELA), and little time is devoted to other content areas like social studies. Preservice elementary teachers can learn to maximize instructional time by integrating social studies content in the ELA block. Using counternarratives, preservice teachers can learn to use children’s literature to teach multiple perspectives to the dominant narrative in the textbooks. This article shares strategies to present counternarratives and examples of children’s literature that can be used in an elementary classroom.

The Importance Of Symbolic Play As A Component Of The Early Childhood Curriculum, Sheila Reed

Essays in Education

Educational research has linked the quality of early childhood education programs to a reduction in special education enrollment and later academic success (Smith, 2004). High quality programs offer curriculums with academics and socialization. Russian developmental psychologist and social constructivist, Lev Vygotsky, believed culture and social interaction guide cognitive development. He, also, suggested that play stimulates the development of abstract thought (Santrock, 2006). The purpose of this literature review was to determine the importance of Symbolic play as an early childhood curriculum component for the development of cognitive and social skills.

Rubin (as cited in Umek & Musek, 2001) identified role …