European Early Childhood Education Journal

     I decided to visit this site to explore some areas that are popular in early childhood education research in other areas of the world.  When exploring this site, I noticed that it was possible to pull up the research articles that were the most read.  This intrigued me.  I wanted to see what articles were of the most interest to visitors of this site.  The most read research articles looked like this:

• Make believe play vs academic skills
• Dynamics of early childhood spaces- Opportunity for outdoor play
• Influence of play context and adult attitudes on young children's physical risk taking during outdoor play
• Perspectives of early childhood teachers on parent teacher partnerships in 5 European countries
• The outdoor environment in Norwegian kindergartners as pedagogical space for toddlers' play, learning, and development
• Emotional complexity of attachment interactions in nursery children
• Children and outdoor environment
• Affordances in outdoor environments and children's physically active play in preschool

     I realized that many of the research articles are also topics that are being researched in the United States.  There were a lot of articles that dealt with learning through play versus academics, family partnerships, emotional attachments, and also a lot of articles that focused on the zero through three age.  These are all areas that I have noticed are areas of focus for us here in this country.  What was most surprising to me was the number of articles focusing on the outdoors and outdoor play.  My own director has talked to me about taking the classroom outside and ordering items that can be used for outdoor learning, so it wasn't a new topic for me.  I just couldn't believe how popular of a topic that this was on the European Early Childhood Education Journal website.  I was looking at the most read articles, and at least one out of three of the articles on the list were examining some facet of  the outdoor environment on early childhood education.  If I could have guessed the most popular topic that would pop up, I would never in a million years have guessed this.  It was really surprising and interesting to me that outdoor play is starting to garner such interest in the world of early childhood education research.