Empirical research shows that adults’ role in play with infant-toddlers is to provide children with play materials, observe from a distance, and control the surrounding dangers. An international trend to increase children’s cognitive skills at a very early age has established a need to better understand toddler’s conceptual learning and how this is supported by the joint play between toddlers and educators. This paper draws upon a cultural-historical perspective, and discusses the concept of play and pedagogical practices of a Conceptual PlayWorld approach to investigate how educators and toddlers generate a Conceptual PlayWorld that supports their conceptual learning and development. We argue that conceptual learning of children at a very young age should be promoted in our institutional practices as it might benefit future scientific learning at school. The educators’ affective engagement is the key to developing a powerful collective play environment to strengthen children’s conceptual thinking.

How parent–child interaction effectively supports children's bilingual heritage language development in a shared book-reading practice is an under-researched area. The in-depth study reported in this paper examined an episode of one child, a four-year-old girl and her father, reading an English story in Chinese. Approximately 70 hours of video observations were collected over nine months and analysed in order to understand how families used storybook reading to support heritage language development. Vygotsky's cultural-historical concepts of motives and conflicts form the foundation of the analysis. The study found that ‘two-way’ engagement when reading a book, elaborations that went beyond the immediate text and creative playful abstractions connected to family practices all contributed to supporting heritage language development. It is argued that shared book reading not only illustrates effective family pedagogical practices for heritage language development, but also offers insights into building pedagogical practices for early years education.

Early childhood research has long established that drawing is a central, and important activity for young children. Less common are investigations into the drawing activity of adults involved in early childhood. A team of adult early childhood researchers, with differing exposures and familiarities with drawing, experimented with intergenerational collaborative drawing with colleagues, students, family members and others, to explore the effectiveness of drawing as a research process and as an arts-based methodology. This testing prompted critical thinking into how drawing might facilitate research that involves young children, to operate in more communicable ways, and how research-focused drawings might occur in reference to a research project.