Product Description: English summary: Kindergarten as a place of learning can only unfold its full potentials if the educational practice taking place in kindergarten encourages children. Children should be allowed to explore their own personality and the world around them...read more

Product Description: This is a complete handbook for anyone organising an off-site trip for children aged 5-11.

The importance of interagency cooperation within children’s services has been highlighted within recent government strategy, including the Every Child Matters agenda, the development of Children’s Centres and the expansion of Extended Schools. Following tragic cases such as Victoria Climbie, the need for effective multi-disciplinary teamwork and interagency co-operation across all education and care settings remains as pressing as ever. Working Together in Children’s Services addresses a range of theoretical perspectives and contexts to stimulate students and practitioners critical thinking about the issues of multi-agency working. The book provides the reader with a critical framework for understanding both new and future developments and explores key issues like: The notion of "working together" and what it means in practice The benefits and barriers of multi-agency work Current policy and requirements for successful interdisciplinary working Essential skills for inter-professional teamwork. As modules on multi-professional working become increasingly common, the book will provide core reading for all students of Early Childhood Studies, Initial Teacher Education and Foundation Degrees in the Early Years. By showing how to develop successful multi-agency partnerships, it is also highly relevant for teachers and practitioners working across children’s services.

Product Description: Although the common association of childhood innocence with pure nature is widely celebrated - indeed often upheld as sacrosanct - this book questions rather than valorises this relationship. By inviting readers to critically reassess the naturalist childhood discourses that are rife within popular culture and early years education, and in lieu of overly sentimentalised, romantic and purist conflations of nature and childhood, it generates complex, nuanced, differentiated and inclusive ways of seeing and representing childhood in the world...read more

Product Description: ‘This book is comprehensive, up-to-date, critical and authoritative. It is also, above all, well written. It will undoubtedly become standard reading for the next generation of teachers in training and practising teachers will also learn a great deal from dipping into its contents...read more

Product Description: ‘This book is comprehensive, up-to-date, critical and authoritative. It is also, above all, well written. It will undoubtedly become standard reading for the next generation of teachers in training and practising teachers will also learn a great deal from dipping into its contents...read more

Product Description: What should be the relationship between early childhood and compulsory education? What can they learn from one another and by working together? The rapid expansion of early childhood education and care means that most children in affluent countries now have several years at pre-school before compulsory education...read more

Product Description: This Guided Reader draws on extracts from the published work of some of the most influential education writers to provide insight, guidance and clarity about key issues affecting Music teachers. Aimed at trainee and newly qualified teachers including those working towards Masters level qualifications, the book brings together key extracts from classic and contemporary writing and contextualises these in both theoretical and practical terms...read more

Product Description: A companion volume to the best selling Foundations of Literacy, this book covers the seven strands of practice in mathematics of the renewed framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, which will be statutory from September 2008...read more

The renowned and highly experienced editors of this book bring together the leading voices in contemporary English Education under the banner of theInternational Federation for the Teaching of English(IFTE). The collected chapters here represent the very best of international writing on the teaching English in the past decade.The key issues and debates surrounding English teaching across the globe are discussed and analysed accessibly, and incorporate wide-ranging topics including:• The impact of high stakes testing on teaching and learning;• Addressing the needs of minority groups;• The digitization of literature and new conceptions of text;• Rewriting the canon;• Dealing with curriculum change;• "Best practices" in the teaching of English;• The tension between 'literacy' and 'English';• English and bilingual education;• The impact of digital technologies on teaching and learning;• Conceptions of English as a subject [secondary and tertiary];• Bringing the critical into the English/Literacy classroom;• The future of subject English;• Empowering voices on the margins;• Pre-service teacher education;• The social networking English classroom.This text looks at the changing face of subject English from the differing perspectives of policy makers, teacher educators, teachers and their students. It tackles some of the hard questions posed by technological advances in a global society, challenges conventional approaches to teaching and points to the emerging possibilities for a traditional school subject such as English in the face of rapid change and increasing societal expectations. Despite all of the converging political and technological threats, the authors of this engaging and insightful text portray an immense confidence in the ultimate worth of teaching and learning subject English.