Journal article

American children's freewheeling play once took place in rural fields and city streets, using equipment largely of their own making. Today, play is increasingly confined to backyards, basements, playrooms and bedrooms, and derives much of its content from video games, television dramas and Saturday morning cartoons. Modern children spend an increasingly large part of their lives alone with their toys, a situation inconceivable several centuries ago. Childhood was once part of a collective village life.

Lab work is the unique feature of a science education. Most of the physical and biological sciences are essentially empirical - research is conducted, knowledge is produced and progress is made in the professional laboratories of scientists. It has seemed logical that student science should reflect professional science and thus science students have been taught, for at least part of the

The task of teaching a severely handicapped child mainstreamed into an ordinary secondary school is far from easy. Very little help can be found in the research literature. The bulk of this is geared to primary age children's needs, and those authors who do write of mainstreaming in secondary schools seem to limit themselves to observing that practical science is one of the most difficult subjects to teach!

What is a car? Shut your eyes and imagine it. You probably have a mental image of a brightly coloured metal and glass box on wheels. Did you 'see' the side view, the front, or maybe you were looking down on top of it? Maybe you experienced a succession

In February 1985 Glenys and Ray Stephens found themselves both teaching new entrants at schools a kilometre apart, Ray at Sumner Primary, Glen at Van Asch College, a school for the hearing-impaired. Integrating the classes twice a week seemed possible, and getting the deaf amongst their peers most important, socially. Here is what happened.

Language learning helps language learning. The more rich and varied the language experience we give deaf children, the more they can organise experiences into further language learning. Learning a language gets harder the older you get and young deaf children should communicate in the language that is most useful and accessible to them. Deaf communities in every generation and country have found signing allows them their most flexible and extensive language interaction.

New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) is a true and unique language. Like any human language it transmits information efficiently,

The young people who are the subject of the National Child Development Study are now aged 25. For most of their lives they have been monitored by the National Children's Bureau and described in 19 books and 200 chapters and journal articles. Many of the books have dealt with very specific issues or examined the circumstances and development of particular subgroups of young people.

Open plan education began in New Zealand primary schools about 1970 when keen groups of teachers who wished to work in teams helped get conventional classroom blocks modified. Also the new minimum code of buildings permitted architects to design' open planned' units. The rnajority of New Zealand open plan units set up before 1973 were modified existing classrooms; after this date, most were architecturally designed. By 1975 there were 200 units working, 113 were designed and 87 were modified classrooms.

When Kirsty was brought to the attention of the Kelburn Visual Resource Centre in September 1979 she was a rather egocentric, tense, frustrated, unhappy and mixed up individual. She wanted to attend University but saw herself being dead from drug addiction by 20. Kirsty was classified as dyslexic. At a chronological age of almost sixteen she had a reading age of eight and had received eight years of intensive remedial reading assistance - in a reading clinic, individually with her schools, and in private tuition at home. Life for Kirsty was an existence of frustration in so many areas.