Junko Minowa

In order to depict a mechanism of preschool teachers' ways of learning at their on-site training session, this study consists of two research projects: project 1 is to clarify preschool teachers and directors overall learning experiences through on-site training session, and project 2 is to examine ways of preschool teachers' and directors' learning process at their actual on-site training session. As results, the feel-secured atmosphere of on-site training session facilitates preschool teachers learning process and making practice visible and being aware of its importance through exchanging their minds and thoughts with each other are considered as what they learnt at the session. In order to give on-site training sessions a structure, it is implied that examining its phase, each teachers learning process, and their interweaving mindsets emerged between within inner-self and interaction with others is crucial.

<p>The purpose of this study is to analyze the practical knowledge of preschool and nursery at clean-up time, namely how teachers help children who carefully tidy up, but do not enough time to complete the next activity. It analyzes preschool and nursery teachers' answers to the questionnaire survey. The result runs as follows: (1) teachers admit or accept that the child carefully puts things away; (2) answers of teachers associated with how preschool and nursery students usually clean up; (3) each preschool and nursery has their own practical knowledge about how to help children who carefully put things away, but do not have enough time to complete the next activity.</p>

In this study, Japanese 3-5-year-old children who play with sand and make sand mountains are observed. As the result, 3-year-old children discover the nature or sand by playing with sand, and they learn how to make mountains using sand by watching their peers who play alongside them. Children as young as four can access this knowledge of the nature of sand and readily develop the skills to make mountain with sand. They also have social skills at this age that allow them to cooperate with peers in the making or sand mountains. Moreover, children of five developed cooperative play by dividing up areas of "work" in making sand mountains.

Internationally, many researchers have studied the issue of quality in early childhood education. This paper reviews what the term ""quality"" means, and how it is studied. First, the paper discusses international research trends and suggests two political strategies and two curriculum traditions that have led to two discourses: the discourse of evaluation and that of meaning-making. Then, Japanese research on the issue of quality is reviewed, and the paper clarifies that Japanese research has focused mainly on issues of quality that are related to professional development and what constitutes professional development for early childhood teachers. Finally, research on measuring quality is reviewed; this review shows that internal evaluation is needed and that there are differences between the evaluation performed by outsiders and that undertaken by insiders.

This research examined what kind of images are verbally and visually exchanged between infants during group play with sand. While they played with sand, their roles, plans, objectives, and circumstances were analyzed. It was clear that they exchanged and shared their images of themes, plans, roles, and associations through some verbal communication, but mostly through their movements with sand, and furthermore that they use the sand itself to communicate with each other through their movements with sand. The study suggests that children exchange and share their images, often in unspoken ways, through their movements with sand and the sand changed by their movements.