The purpose of this article is to investigate the efficacy of Sandplay Therapy (SPT) in reducing children's kindergarten entrance anxiety in an effort to provide front-line preschool teachers with insights and strategies for addressing the emotional distress of children in their first days of nursery school. As a case study, the application of SPT…

Children's behaviours during bullying episodes are associated with both interpersonal-situational variables (e.g., social status indices) and personal-dispositional variables (e.g., emotional competence). The aim of the present study was to investigate -- in a group of 202 kindergarteners (age range: 3-6 years) -- the relationships between…

Relationships with others are not always easy and harmonious. Already in the kindergarten group, there are many conflicts between children, which are the result of a distorted way of developing interpersonal relationships. It is the most important task of the educator, parent and psychologist--to recognize these dangerous trends and help the child…

In Hong Kong, play-based learning has been highlighted in the latest curriculum guide in 2017. While adopting 'child-centredness' as the core value of kindergarten education can enrich children's play experiences. However, little emphasis has been placed on how young children perceive play-based learning in the classroom. The aim of this…

Mistakes are at the crux of daily classroom learning. This is the case even in the earliest grades. While the instructional value of mistakes is wellknown among educators, little research documents how young children experience mistakes in real-world school settings. In the present study, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 Kindergarten…

In this longitudinal multiinformant study negative emotionality and sensory processing sensitivity were compared as susceptibility markers among kindergartners. Participating children (N = 264, 52.9% boys) were Dutch kindergartners (M[subscript age] = 4.77, SD = 0.60), followed across three waves, spaced seven months apart. Results show that…

This study examined the relationship of teachers' ratings of students' 21st century skills (i.e., persistence, curiosity, externalizing and internalizing affect, and cognition) via the Human Behavior Rating Scale: Brief (HBRS: Brief; Eaves & Woods-Groves, 2011) with student performance. Midwestern K-11 teachers (n = 96) rated students (n =…

The objective of this study is to examine the trajectory of internalizing problems across middle childhood among a population sample of Australian children, and to understand the timing of explanatory factors related to children's development of internalizing problems, by using multiple-indicator latent growth curve modeling. Participants were…

The goal of the present study was to explore young children's attitudes and responses to different forms of social withdrawal by eliciting responses to hypothetical vignettes. Participants included 137 children (49 boys, 88 girls) in kindergarten and grade 1 classes (M[subscript age] = 75.94 months, SD = 9.03) in Ottawa, Canada. Parents rated…

Logistic regression analyses were used to establish the most robust set of risk factors that would best predict borderline/clinical levels of problem behavior (i.e., a t score at or above 60 on the Child Behavior Checklist Total Problem scale) of kindergarten and first-grade children at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Results showed…

There is a distinction between girls and boys regarding the manifestation of sex-appropriate behaviour from an early age. There is evidence that boys and girls play and are reared differently, and also are reinforced differently to manifest behaviours regarded as playful. The purpose of this study was to identify if there were differences between…