Teaching Young Children: An Introduction

This engagingly interactive and easy-to-read book outlines how to deliver quality early education and care through its focus on curriculum. Full-color throughout, this edition's features include more concrete applications in the book—and on the website. The author weaves five essential elements of effective early childhood education throughout the book: understanding development, play, guidance, working with families, and diversity. The book provides a rigorous overview of the planning, preparation, and delivery of a curriculum for young children, one that's built around six specific curriculum areas, each explored in its own chapter. The author stresses the importance of play and the need to nurture each child's natural affinity for learning through experimentation and exploration. Separate chapters on the importance of the outdoor environment and the effect of technology on early childhood education help to complete this well-rounded presentation. For pre-service and in-service teachers at the pre-school and elementary grade levels.

Teaching Young Children: An Introduction, Third Edition, provides an accessible and realistic introduction to the joys and challenges of working with children from birth through age 8 in today's dynamic early childhood education settings.

A Unique Approach: Five Foundational Themes

To give students a framework for understanding what it means to be an early childhood educator, the author weaves five critical components of early childhood education through the text:

• child development
• play
• guiding children
• working with families and communities
• diversity

An Emphasis on Curriculum–and Play

This text includes six chapters devoted to curriculum for enhancing development and teaching the content areas. It is the only text of its kind with separate chapters on play, outdoor play, and indoor environments.

Concrete Applications

Explicit strategies are provided in many feature boxes so that students can apply theories and concepts in early childhood settings. Also, students generate their own applications in the "Multimedia Explorations and Activities" feature as they view video segments (provided to instructors), do research on the Web using selected content, and record responses on the Companion Website at www.prenhall.com/henniger

Instructor resources include:

• Instructor's Manual and Test Bank
• PowerPoint slides
• ABC News/Prentice Hall Early Childhood Education videos
• TestGen, a computerized test management system