The Early Childhood Research Podcast

We all have opinions about children and what’s good for them, and our parents and communities have their own beliefs, too. As educators, how do we communicate effectively to families who may have misconceptions about how children learn and grow? This post is all about positive and meaningful communication with families. At the bottom you’ll find links to free resources that will be amazingly helpful to you. You can listen to this episode above, listen to it on iTunes or Stitcher, or read the transcript below. Megan Keyes This is episode 7 and today I’m speaking to Megan Keyes about the gap that exists between early childhood educators and the general public regarding what we understand about child development and care, why it matters, and what we can do to align those understandings. Megan works for the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia. You can find links to free resources below and I can’t emphasize enough how much help these resources will be for any educator who communicates with parents about how children learn and grow. Now to the interview. Megan Keyes, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. We need the public behind us to gain government support The Centre for Community Child Health has put a ton of time, money and effort into working out how best to communicate with the public about early childhood development and care. Why have you done this? The Centre for Community Child Health has been looking at how to improve outcomes for children and families for over 20 years now. What we know from over 2 decades of work is that if we’re going to make a difference for children and children’s outcomes governments need to make a much greater investment in early childhood development. I’m talking about the very early years from conception onwards. Prevention is better than cure However, at the moment the biggest government investment goes into intervention or treatment. Of course, intervention and treatment are necessary but if we just continue down that path of pumping more and more money into the back end rather than the front end we’re never going to be able to turn things around for children. And the cost of our health system will become completely unsustainable. But we’ve known all this for a really long time now and despite a lot of advocacy work from across the early years sector we haven’t really been able to make the big changes that we need to make. What we’ve come to realise is that if we’re going to change the way governments invest in children and families we need the general public to push for this, to get behind the advocacy efforts of the early years sector. Up until now we haven’t been seeing a high level of public support for early childhood development, and we weren’t really sure why because the science seems so compelling to us. We couldn’t understand why it wasn’t so compelling for everyone else. Then we came across a strategic communications organization called The Frameworks Institute who are based in Washington. Gaps between expert and public knowledge After doing some work with Frameworks we realized that actually the problem was us. And when I say ‘us’ I mean the whole early years sector. We weren’t communicating about the science of early childhoo...

We all have opinions about children and what’s good for them, and our parents and communities have their own beliefs, too. As educators, how do we communicate effectively to families who may have misconceptions about how children learn and grow? This post is all about positive and meaningful communication with families. At the bottom you’ll find links to free resources that will be amazingly helpful to you. You can listen to this episode above, listen to it on iTunes or Stitcher, or read the transcript below. Megan Keyes This is episode 7 and today I’m speaking to Megan Keyes about the gap that exists between early childhood educators and the general public regarding what we understand about child development and care, why it matters, and what we can do to align those understandings. Megan works for the Centre for Community Child Health at The Royal Children’s Hospital and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia. You can find links to free resources below and I can’t emphasize enough how much help these resources will be for any educator who communicates with parents about how children learn and grow. Now to the interview. Megan Keyes, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. We need the public behind us to gain government support The Centre for Community Child Health has put a ton of time, money and effort into working out how best to communicate with the public about early childhood development and care. Why have you done this? The Centre for Community Child Health has been looking at how to improve outcomes for children and families for over 20 years now. What we know from over 2 decades of work is that if we’re going to make a difference for children and children’s outcomes governments need to make a much greater investment in early childhood development. I’m talking about the very early years from conception onwards. Prevention is better than cure However, at the moment the biggest government investment goes into intervention or treatment. Of course, intervention and treatment are necessary but if we just continue down that path of pumping more and more money into the back end rather than the front end we’re never going to be able to turn things around for children. And the cost of our health system will become completely unsustainable. But we’ve known all this for a really long time now and despite a lot of advocacy work from across the early years sector we haven’t really been able to make the big changes that we need to make. What we’ve come to realise is that if we’re going to change the way governments invest in children and families we need the general public to push for this, to get behind the advocacy efforts of the early years sector. Up until now we haven’t been seeing a high level of public support for early childhood development, and we weren’t really sure why because the science seems so compelling to us. We couldn’t understand why it wasn’t so compelling for everyone else. Then we came across a strategic communications organization called The Frameworks Institute who are based in Washington. Gaps between expert and public knowledge After doing some work with Frameworks we realized that actually the problem was us. And when I say ‘us’ I mean the whole early years sector. We weren’t communicating about the science of early childhood...

What is the best way to learn? Because people are so different it seems that what’s ‘best’ may be somewhat subjective. Today, we’re asking the question: Does movement improve learning outcomes? And the answer is a resounding yes! Fortunately there are lots of other benefits for children, too. You can listen to this episode above, listen to it on iTunes or Stitcher, or read the transcript below. Below the transcript you’ll find some helpful links if you want to look into this further. Introduction Welcome, it’s great to have you here. I’m Liz and I’m the host of The Early Childhood Research Podcast. This is episode 6 and today I’m speaking to child psychologist and researcher, Myrto Mavilidi, about how movement can positively affect learning. Myrto is Greek, so she completed her psychology degree in Greece, then had an exchange year in Paris, fortunately she speaks French. Myrto then did a Masters degree in the Netherlands where she focused on human learning and performance, in other words, researching the most effective ways to learn. She also spent some time providing psychological support to a children’s hospital in Greece, working particularly with children with autism and with special needs. Now Myrto is working towards her PhD in Early Years at the Early Start Research Institute based at the University of Wollongong in Australia. Her focus is researching the effects of movement on children’s cognition. Does movement improve learning outcomes? Myrto Mavilidi, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hello, Liz. Thanks so much for your invitation! The importance of using gestures Research is showing that subtle body movements such as gesturing with our hands helps us learn more effectively. Can you explain why or how this happens? Gesturing is a very natural process that occurs spontaneously and it helps contribute to cognitive processes because it decreases working memory load and facilitates retention, problem solving and learning. This is based on research, and these movements are integrated with the learning tasks and they are only effective when they’re meaningful or congruent with the learning tasks. It has also been found that if you force someone to gesture a certain way then it can be detrimental for learning, so it’s important that they are natural and they occur spontaneously. Gestures need to be natural and spontaneous You want the movement to be related to the learning, but you want it to be spontaneous. Yes, if it’s related to gesturing, because you use it when you talk, you use it when you’re thinking. So the challenge, then, is to design learning tasks in such a way that learners gesture spontaneously in a task-relevant way. Does it mean that gesturing with our arms, for example, while we’re learning something new means we take more information in, or does it mean that we’re better at remembering what we’ve learned so we can pull it back out of our brain more easily? Gesturing makes the trace richer and deeper in the memory so then it’s easier to find and recall. If you think about children, when they start learning counting they use their hands, they use gestures spontaneously and naturally and this helps them remember more, because the information that they receive is connected better. One of the reasons using the fingers is so powerful is that the load that is imposed by this learning task is now divided between the memory and the hand,

What is the best way to learn? Because people are so different it seems that what’s ‘best’ may be somewhat subjective. Today, we’re asking the question: Does movement improve learning outcomes? And the answer is a resounding yes! Fortunately there are lots of other benefits for children, too. You can listen to this episode above, listen to it on iTunes or Stitcher, or read the transcript below. Below the transcript you’ll find some helpful links if you want to look into this further. Introduction Welcome, it’s great to have you here. I’m Liz and I’m the host of The Early Childhood Research Podcast. This is episode 6 and today I’m speaking to child psychologist and researcher, Myrto Mavilidi, about how movement can positively affect learning. Myrto is Greek, so she completed her psychology degree in Greece, then had an exchange year in Paris, fortunately she speaks French. Myrto then did a Masters degree in the Netherlands where she focused on human learning and performance, in other words, researching the most effective ways to learn. She also spent some time providing psychological support to a children’s hospital in Greece, working particularly with children with autism and with special needs. Now Myrto is working towards her PhD in Early Years at the Early Start Research Institute based at the University of Wollongong in Australia. Her focus is researching the effects of movement on children’s cognition. Does movement improve learning outcomes? Myrto Mavilidi, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hello, Liz. Thanks so much for your invitation! The importance of using gestures Research is showing that subtle body movements such as gesturing with our hands helps us learn more effectively. Can you explain why or how this happens? Gesturing is a very natural process that occurs spontaneously and it helps contribute to cognitive processes because it decreases working memory load and facilitates retention, problem solving and learning. This is based on research, and these movements are integrated with the learning tasks and they are only effective when they’re meaningful or congruent with the learning tasks. It has also been found that if you force someone to gesture a certain way then it can be detrimental for learning, so it’s important that they are natural and they occur spontaneously. Gestures need to be natural and spontaneous You want the movement to be related to the learning, but you want it to be spontaneous. Yes, if it’s related to gesturing, because you use it when you talk, you use it when you’re thinking. So the challenge, then, is to design learning tasks in such a way that learners gesture spontaneously in a task-relevant way. Does it mean that gesturing with our arms, for example, while we’re learning something new means we take more information in, or does it mean that we’re better at remembering what we’ve learned so we can pull it back out of our brain more easily? Gesturing makes the trace richer and deeper in the memory so then it’s easier to find and recall. If you think about children, when they start learning counting they use their hands, they use gestures spontaneously and naturally and this helps them remember more, because the information that they receive is connected better. One of the reasons using the fingers is so powerful is that the load that is imposed by this learning task is now divided between the memory and the hand,

How long is it since you considered the United Nation’s perspective on the rights of a child? Have you ever? It’s quite an enlightening exercise so this podcast episode goes through these rights and then shows how one early childhood centre has adapted those rights into a Children’s Rights Charter. It’s a beautiful example of a group of teachers working together over a period of time, and seriously putting the rights of the children in their centre onto paper. Since it’s an evolving document that’s plastered up on their walls, it means that it’s taken seriously. Every teacher, parent and child knows the guidelines so there’s consistency of care across the board. You can listen to this podcast episode on the player above or through iTunes or Stitcher, or read through the transcript below. The rights of a child Today I’m spending just a little time talking about the rights of the child. What are the rights of our children? What does the UN say they are? And what does that mean in the classroom or at home? The UN has a document of over 7000 words talking about the rights of the child and obviously most people are not going to dig their way through that. But I can see why it’s necessary because some people do misinterpret the rights as they are written. Fortunately, we don’t have to wade through that because they have been summarised into smaller points. One of the most important points is that it is supposed to include every child. All children should have access to equal rights. We know that that’s a wish rather than reality. This Convention has been the most widely signed of all the human rights Conventions so we know that countries take this very seriously, but there’s a big difference between ratifying a Convention and actually protecting children. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Please feel free to download the following 2 posters containing the Rights of the Child in child-friendly language. What do they mean? There are so many issues that can be raised with each of the points above, but for now it’s just a reminder of what the conventions are, what the rights of the children are, and as a reminder of something we so often take for granted. I came across a Children’s Charter this week that was in the magazine, Every Child, that is published by Early Childhood Australia. It was so well written that it really resonated with me and it’s one reason why I wanted to do this episode. I’m going to read out to you what this early childhood centre decided would make a good Children’s Rights Charter. The staff all got together and they’ve changed this over the years, but it’s from Cooloon Children’s Centre in NSW, Australia. I love the way they’ve put the UN Children’s Rights into terms that make sense in their early childhood centre. Children’s Rights Charter The following poster is also included in the download link above. You might like to use it yourself. Just enlarge it as you print and you’ll have a great poster for your centre. Please note: the points below are not mine,

How long is it since you considered the United Nation’s perspective on the rights of a child? Have you ever? It’s quite an enlightening exercise so this podcast episode goes through these rights and then shows how one early childhood centre has adapted those rights into a Children’s Rights Charter. It’s a beautiful example of a group of teachers working together over a period of time, and seriously putting the rights of the children in their centre onto paper. Since it’s an evolving document that’s plastered up on their walls, it means that it’s taken seriously. Every teacher, parent and child knows the guidelines so there’s consistency of care across the board. You can listen to this podcast episode on the player above or through iTunes or Stitcher, or read through the transcript below. The rights of a child Today I’m spending just a little time talking about the rights of the child. What are the rights of our children? What does the UN say they are? And what does that mean in the classroom or at home? The UN has a document of over 7000 words talking about the rights of the child and obviously most people are not going to dig their way through that. But I can see why it’s necessary because some people do misinterpret the rights as they are written. Fortunately, we don’t have to wade through that because they have been summarised into smaller points. One of the most important points is that it is supposed to include every child. All children should have access to equal rights. We know that that’s a wish rather than reality. This Convention has been the most widely signed of all the human rights Conventions so we know that countries take this very seriously, but there’s a big difference between ratifying a Convention and actually protecting children. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Please feel free to download the following 2 posters containing the Rights of the Child in child-friendly language. What do they mean? There are so many issues that can be raised with each of the points above, but for now it’s just a reminder of what the conventions are, what the rights of the children are, and as a reminder of something we so often take for granted. I came across a Children’s Charter this week that was in the magazine, Every Child, that is published by Early Childhood Australia. It was so well written that it really resonated with me and it’s one reason why I wanted to do this episode. I’m going to read out to you what this early childhood centre decided would make a good Children’s Rights Charter. The staff all got together and they’ve changed this over the years, but it’s from Cooloon Children’s Centre in NSW, Australia. I love the way they’ve put the UN Children’s Rights into terms that make sense in their early childhood centre. Children’s Rights Charter The following poster is also included in the download link above. You might like to use it yourself. Just enlarge it as you print and you’ll have a great poster for your centre. Please note: the points below are not mine,

School readiness is a challenging area in education, particularly for less advantaged children who have not had the opportunity to attend preschool. This podcast episode is all about one teacher’s experience of running an 8-week music program specifically to help kids get ready for Kinder. You can listen to it above, listen to it on iTunes or read the transcript below. And don’t forget to scroll down to download the free pdf Allison created for us for when we want to try and introduce our own music classes for school readiness! Introduction Welcome, it’s great to have you here. I’m Liz and I’m the host of The Early Childhood Research Podcast. This is episode 4 and today I’m speaking to teacher and researcher, Allison Cameron, about using music to help prepare children for school. Allison has been teaching music for many years but she also specialised in learning difficulties through her Masters degree and she’s currently working on her PhD at the Early Start Research Institute based at the University of Wollongong in Australia. During the last school term of 2014 Allison was asked to run a school readiness program by a Community Centre that was preparing their children for Kindergarten, and these children had never attended preschool so there was some concern about how well they would be able to adapt and be ready for making friends and learning. School Readiness Through Music Allison Cameron, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s no problem, it’s my pleasure! This programme was all about school readiness and I know you wanted to put an emphasis on social skills. What social skills did you choose to emphasize? What social and executive function skills are important for school readiness? Patience and Taking Turns Being able to wait for your turn to speak is really important in the classroom, but it’s also important in order to become a good friend, that you can listen to your friend and not talk over the top of them all the time, which is really important in the playground as well as in the classroom. But the other sorts of things that I would be looking at would be not just taking turns with speaking but taking turns with the equipment. Obviously when I started the classes I made sure that every child got a turn, but gradually I lessened that because being able to cope with the disappointment of not always getting a turn is really important. But it was those sorts of things that I was thinking about. Delayed Gratification It’s also an important part of delaying gratification. For example, in the classroom you don’t get to tell your news every day but you know that on Thursdays it’s going to be your day. These are really important skills for children because it actually helps them in their learning and helps them to be a really valued member of the class. Self-regulation The other things that overlap with social skills are executive function skills, which are things like self-regulation, being able to plan and understand the concept of planning from the teacher’s instructions. Inhibition control. So knowing when to stop, when to start and working memory skills. I was thinking about being able to follow through with a series of instructions. To listen to those instructions, take them on board and then act on them, because often those children who are able to master those skills very quickly learn more because they actually spend more time on tasks in the classroom. Children who struggle with those things often spend a lot of time going back to the teacher saying, “what are we meant to be doing?” And then they’ll get lost on the way to the book...

School readiness is a challenging area in education, particularly for less advantaged children who have not had the opportunity to attend preschool. This podcast episode is all about one teacher’s experience of running an 8-week music program specifically to help kids get ready for Kinder. You can listen to it above, listen to it on iTunes or read the transcript below. And don’t forget to scroll down to download the free pdf Allison created for us for when we want to try and introduce our own music classes for school readiness! Introduction Welcome, it’s great to have you here. I’m Liz and I’m the host of The Early Childhood Research Podcast. This is episode 4 and today I’m speaking to teacher and researcher, Allison Cameron, about using music to help prepare children for school. Allison has been teaching music for many years but she also specialised in learning difficulties through her Masters degree and she’s currently working on her PhD at the Early Start Research Institute based at the University of Wollongong in Australia. During the last school term of 2014 Allison was asked to run a school readiness program by a Community Centre that was preparing their children for Kindergarten, and these children had never attended preschool so there was some concern about how well they would be able to adapt and be ready for making friends and learning. School Readiness Through Music Allison Cameron, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s no problem, it’s my pleasure! This programme was all about school readiness and I know you wanted to put an emphasis on social skills. What social skills did you choose to emphasize? What social and executive function skills are important for school readiness? Patience and Taking Turns Being able to wait for your turn to speak is really important in the classroom, but it’s also important in order to become a good friend, that you can listen to your friend and not talk over the top of them all the time, which is really important in the playground as well as in the classroom. But the other sorts of things that I would be looking at would be not just taking turns with speaking but taking turns with the equipment. Obviously when I started the classes I made sure that every child got a turn, but gradually I lessened that because being able to cope with the disappointment of not always getting a turn is really important. But it was those sorts of things that I was thinking about. Delayed Gratification It’s also an important part of delaying gratification. For example, in the classroom you don’t get to tell your news every day but you know that on Thursdays it’s going to be your day. These are really important skills for children because it actually helps them in their learning and helps them to be a really valued member of the class. Self-regulation The other things that overlap with social skills are executive function skills, which are things like self-regulation, being able to plan and understand the concept of planning from the teacher’s instructions. Inhibition control. So knowing when to stop, when to start and working memory skills. I was thinking about being able to follow through with a series of instructions. To listen to those instructions, take them on board and then act on them, because often those children who are able to master those skills very quickly learn more because they actually spend more time on tasks in the classroom. Children who struggle with those things often spend a lot of time going back to the teacher saying, “what are we meant to be doing?” And then they’ll get lost on the way to the book ...

Bullying, and being bullied, can start from a very young age. As adults are influential in the lives of young children it is important that we are proactive and diligent when it comes to managing it. Click on the player above to listen to this week’s podcast episode or pop over to iTunes to listen directly from The Early Childhood Research Podcast. If you download the episode or listen through iTunes you’re managing professional development while shopping or camping! Transcript You can find the transcript for this episode on this previous research post 10 Ways to Combat Bullying in the Early Years. You’ll also find some recommended books for using with children and the research credits there. Bullying: A Definition Free Poster Click the link to download this Bullying: What Should I Do? poster. The third point is especially important for those at-risk children who react aggressively to being bullied. If they can practice greater self-control while still young it will help prevent the victim-bully cycle. Talking about emotions Encouraging children to talk about their feelings, and teaching them the vocabulary they can use to express themselves, can be helpful. You might like to use this animated video of Five Little Ducks and their Feelings as a jumping off point. There is a teaching pack available for learning about emotions using the Five Little Ducks. You can take a look at it here at my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Previous Podcasts * #0  The Early Childhood Research Podcast: An Introduction * #1  Healthy Eating in Young Children * #2  Developing Pre-Writing Skills Leave a rating If you enjoyed this episode please add a review and rating on iTunes. It helps others find the podcast more easily. Or, if there was a particular point that resonated with you perhaps you could share that on your Facebook page or on Twitter? I wish you happy teaching and learning!

Bullying, and being bullied, can start from a very young age. As adults are influential in the lives of young children it is important that we are proactive and diligent when it comes to managing it. Click on the player above to listen to this week’s podcast episode or pop over to iTunes to listen directly from The Early Childhood Research Podcast. If you download the episode or listen through iTunes you’re managing professional development while shopping or camping! Transcript You can find the transcript for this episode on this previous research post 10 Ways to Combat Bullying in the Early Years. You’ll also find some recommended books for using with children and the research credits there. Bullying: A Definition Free Poster Click the link to download this Bullying: What Should I Do? poster. The third point is especially important for those at-risk children who react aggressively to being bullied. If they can practice greater self-control while still young it will help prevent the victim-bully cycle. Talking about emotions Encouraging children to talk about their feelings, and teaching them the vocabulary they can use to express themselves, can be helpful. You might like to use this animated video of Five Little Ducks and their Feelings as a jumping off point. There is a teaching pack available for learning about emotions using the Five Little Ducks. You can take a look at it here at my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Previous Podcasts * #0  The Early Childhood Research Podcast: An Introduction * #1  Healthy Eating in Young Children * #2  Developing Pre-Writing Skills Leave a rating If you enjoyed this episode please add a review and rating on iTunes. It helps others find the podcast more easily. Or, if there was a particular point that resonated with you perhaps you could share that on your Facebook page or on Twitter? I wish you happy teaching and learning!

The process of learning to write is a long one, considering that it’s not just about knowing how to write letters or spell words. Well before children get to that stage there are other skills they need to develop so they’ll be ready. This podcast episode is all about why pre-writing skills are important and how pre-writing skills can be developed. Click on the player above to listen to this week’s episode or pop over to iTunes to listen directly from The Early Childhood Research Podcast. If you download the episode or listen through iTunes you can listen to it while you’re washing up or driving to work! Transcript The transcript for this episode can be found on this previous research post Pre-Writing Skills: Essential for Early Learners. You’ll also find the research credits there. Free Activities Here are some free line tracing printables and 10 cutting activities. Check out my review for these hands on weekly activity plans that will give your kids an activity a day for 6 months. Pinterest Boards Visit my Fine Motor Skills Pinterest board and my Pre-Writing Skills board for ideas! This post from Powerful Mothering has links to 25 Fine Motor Skills Pinterest boards that will inspire you with hundreds of fun and practically free ideas! Infographic Summary Pin it to keep as a quick and easy reminder! Previous Podcasts * #0  The Early Childhood Research Podcast: An Introduction * #1  Healthy Eating in Young Children Leave a rating If you enjoyed this episode please add a review and rating on iTunes. It helps others find the podcast more easily. Or, if there was a particular point that resonated with you perhaps you could share that on your Facebook page? I wish you happy teaching and learning!

The process of learning to write is a long one, considering that it’s not just about knowing how to write letters or spell words. Well before children get to that stage there are other skills they need to develop so they’ll be ready. This podcast episode is all about why pre-writing skills are important and how pre-writing skills can be developed. Click on the player above to listen to this week’s episode or pop over to iTunes to listen directly from The Early Childhood Research Podcast. If you download the episode or listen through iTunes you can listen to it while you’re washing up or driving to work! Transcript The transcript for this episode can be found on this previous research post Pre-Writing Skills: Essential for Early Learners. You’ll also find the research credits there. Free Activities Here are some free line tracing printables and 10 cutting activities. Check out my review for these hands on weekly activity plans that will give your kids an activity a day for 6 months. Pinterest Boards Visit my Fine Motor Skills Pinterest board and my Pre-Writing Skills board for ideas! This post from Powerful Mothering has links to 25 Fine Motor Skills Pinterest boards that will inspire you with hundreds of fun and practically free ideas! Infographic Summary Pin it to keep as a quick and easy reminder! Previous Podcasts * #0  The Early Childhood Research Podcast: An Introduction * #1  Healthy Eating in Young Children Leave a rating If you enjoyed this episode please add a review and rating on iTunes. It helps others find the podcast more easily. Or, if there was a particular point that resonated with you perhaps you could share that on your Facebook page? I wish you happy teaching and learning!

This podcast episode about healthy eating in young children is taken from a previous research post that you can find here. If you click this link you’ll find a transcript that’s fairly close to this episode as well the list of research articles that were used. Click on the player above to listen to this week’s episode or pop over to iTunes to listen directly from The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Here is the free I’m SO Healthy! printable that you can use to talk about health with your child. You can find other research-based posts here. I wish you happy teaching and learning! Previous Podcasts #0  The Early Childhood Research Podcast: An Introduction

This podcast episode about healthy eating in young children is taken from a previous research post that you can find here. If you click this link you’ll find a transcript that’s fairly close to this episode as well the list of research articles that were used. Click on the player above to listen to this week’s episode or pop over to iTunes to listen directly from The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Here is the free I’m SO Healthy! printable that you can use to talk about health with your child. You can find other research-based posts here. I wish you happy teaching and learning! Previous Podcasts #0  The Early Childhood Research Podcast: An Introduction

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I love to take research papers and summarise the useful points. I believe that blogs are a great avenue for taking information and spreading it widely to where it’s needed most, in homes and preschools and kindergartens everywhere! I have been considering podcasting for quite a few months now and I’m finally ready to get started. I will be providing transcripts of each episode, and that’s where the text below comes from. It’s the transcript of the first introduction. You can either read it or click on the player at the top of this post to hear it. You can find The Early Childhood Research Podcast in iTunes, just do a search for it and you’ll find all the episodes to date! An Introduction Welcome, I’m Liz and I’m the host of The Early Childhood Research Podcast. I’m an Australian Early Childhood teacher with a research masters in Early Childhood Education and a coursework masters in Educational Leadership. I have a blog called Liz’s Early Learning Spot.com that focuses on Early Childhood, and there you’ll find tons of free printables and teaching ideas. For the past year I’ve written a monthly research-based post on topics I thought teachers and parents would find helpful: classroom management, the importance of pre-writing skills, how to combat bullying, goal setting with children and so on. However I really wanted a platform where researchers and teachers and parents with specialist knowledge could speak for themselves. Instead of me reading the latest research and pulling out what I think is most helpful to my readers – I wanted to hear from people in the field. The university researchers, the teachers doing action research in their classrooms, and parents, too, who can talk about issues from their perspectives. This will be a weekly podcast and I’ll be keeping the length under 20 minutes. I’ll be publishing a written transcript of each episode at Liz’s Early Learning Spot under the podcast tab. So that’s the background to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. I hope you’ll enjoy each episode and if you do, please consider subscribing. Thanks for listening and I wish you happy teaching and learning.