Comprehensive resources for parents and professionals in play-based early childhood education

All Downloads


How To Use This Site

Website User Guide

A comprehensive guide on how to use the early learning site – whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or a daycare/day home operator.

Quick Guide

Here is a quick, one-page guide to the Early Learning website.

Assessment

Assessment

Learning cannot take place without assessment. It’s especially important children are given opportunities to evaluate and participant in their own learning. This document lists what to look for in an early learning classroom.

Language & Literacy

Learning a Second Language

How can you create an ideal environment for learning another language? Also, find out why maintaining proficiency in the home language is key to a young child’s success in school.

Literacy at Home

Create a learning environment that supports language and literacy development.

Math

Math Landmarks

This document contains information about core math skills, such as compensation, patterns and cardinality. The skills are also identified in the math-related play outlined in the other math downloads on the site.

Measuring Blocks

Mathematical reasoning and problem solving are just some of the math skills gained by playing with a simple set of blocks.

The Sleepover

A simple bedtime story can open the door to another “what if” conversation that involves math.

Road side or trailer side?

Even a walk along and across a muddy creek can be explored deeply in a mathematical way.

Jumping Frogs

Read how one child develops correspondence and compensation skills, thanks to a simple game of jumping frogs, rocks or marbles.

More Toast?

Breakfast time can be a great opportunity to think mathematically, as one mom and her son discovered.

A Remainder of One

Many children’s books address mathematical ideas in fun and interesting ways. Simply reading them, however, won’t instill deep mathematical understanding. But when kids can model the stories and are encouraged to find ways to generalize the mathematical ideas the stories contain, books can provide great opportunities for deepening mathematical understanding.

Marble Soup

Ratios are the name of the game when a young child decides to make “soup” out of different types of marbles.

Dice

A simple set of dice provides opportunities for numerical recognition, addition and subtraction.

Hungry Monsters

Embedding problems in a rich way is something many teachers struggle with. Find out how a good problem encourages students to reason about what can change, by how much, and what must stay the same in order to preserve certain aspects of the original problem.

Play

Facilitating Children’s Play

Dr. Jane Hewes has tips on how adults can create an environment that allows children to explore their environment and learn through play.

CMEC Play Based Learning Statement
Object Play

Creating a play environment where children are encouraged to pick up, explore and manipulate objects results in endless learning opportunities.

CMEC Early Learning Framework
Potions

Adding food colouring to water is not only a great way to explore different colour combinations, but to allow your child to systemically work through all the possibilities.