Four-year-olds spend their mornings in a specific type of forest in southern Finland. It’s more of a loose arrangement of trees, mud, and whatever the season has to offer than a playground. There is no lesson plan being followed by the kids. By purposeful national design, they are engaging in what Finnish early childhood education has come to view as fundamental: learning with their hands, outside, and in any weather. It wasn’t an accident. Someone wrote a resolution, which contributed to its occurrence. For decades, the OMEP World Assembly, which represents early childhood educators in over 70 nations, has been…
Author: Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers
Kelsey Myers is a Senior Editor at worldomep.org and a dedicated advocate for early childhood education whose work begins — and ends — with a simple belief: that the earliest years of a child's life matter more than almost anything else we can invest in. Based at a local school, Kelsey works daily alongside the children and families whose experiences inform everything she writes. She doesn't observe early education from a distance. She is inside it — in the classrooms, on the playgrounds, in the conversations between teachers and parents that shape how young children understand the world around them. That proximity gives her writing a warmth and specificity that purely policy-driven commentary rarely achieves. Through her writing at worldomep.org, Kelsey brings that same energy to readers — making the case, clearly and consistently, that early childhood education deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Kelsey shares her personal opinions on: https://x.com/Butterflyboule
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No one is surprised by Washington these days. The talking points have been practiced, the rooms are well-known, and the partisan tendency to look away as soon as the opposing side begins speaking has practically become automatic. Therefore, it was the kind of moment that people in those hallways noticed when a briefing on workforce economics and early childhood policy subtly brought senators from both parties into genuine, leaning-forward attention. The session, which was based on research from OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, focused on a topic that is often overlooked in the typical back-and-forth regarding childcare…
Warnings about children and technology are issued by international organizations in a way that seems almost routine. After a resolution is passed, a statement is issued, and a few headlines appear for a day or two, Silicon Valley’s machinery continues to function essentially unaltered. However, the OMEP resolution on digital childhood has a different vibe. Or it ought to, anyway. For many years, OMEP, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education, has been raising concerns about the digital colonization of early childhood, frequently in partnership with UNESCO. Their stance does not stem from a fear of technology. The fact that…
In Umm al-Khair, the walk to school is precisely one kilometer long. It passes through a valley in the South Hebron Hills, a section of dusty West Bank land where Palestinian Bedouin children have been walking for decades with their backpacks bouncing. They arrive at their classroom in the same manner as children everywhere else: exhausted, slightly hungry, and somewhat reluctant. Then, under cover of darkness, settlers from the nearby Israeli settlement of Carmel crossed it with razor wire one night in April. The road was gone by morning. Since then, at least 55 kids have been unable to go…
A school uniform has an almost unremarkable quality. The black shoes, the pleated skirt, and the white shirt. On a Monday morning, you can see hundreds of kids rushing through iron gates with nearly identical outfits and bouncing lunch bags if you walk past any primary school gate. It appears well-organized. deliberate. Even safer. However, a significant study from the University of Cambridge is posing a question that directly challenges that neat image: what if the uniform is actually getting in the way? The study, which was published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, used data from 135…
Every wall in Ryan Nelson’s kindergarten classroom at Jenny Lind Elementary has a timer. Every wall, not just one. He divides the day into these brief, intentional blocks because he thinks kids this age concentrate best in fifteen-minute increments. Most of his students pause in the middle of their sentences, look up, and move when the timer goes off. Observing five-year-olds who are already learning that time is structured and that things have an order is strangely touching. Knowing what many of them missed in the years prior to coming here is what makes it so moving. The kids who…
Between the holiday break and the start of regular business hours on January 3, 2024, Cambridge University Press & Assessment and Cognizant discreetly announced that they had extended a multi-year collaboration, this time with an increased emphasis on artificial intelligence. As is always the case, the announcement was made through a press release that was easy to scroll past due to its measured corporate language. However, the scope of what was described merits a closer examination. Cambridge is not your typical publisher. It is a part of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious academic…
Somewhere in the course materials is a quote from an Australian girl that makes you stop cold: “It means saving the world for later.” She was attempting to define sustainability. She is most likely five or six years old. And for some reason, she got it exactly right without the need for a lecture, a worksheet, or a standardized test. Even though it’s a tiny moment, it conveys a significant aspect of what “Sustainability from the Start” is trying to accomplish and explains why it has reached over 80,000 early childhood educators since its debut. With funding from the European…
Making a scientific case for something that kids do instinctively, without guidance, from the moment they can reach for an object seems almost counterintuitive. However, that is precisely what researchers affiliated with OMEP—the World Organization for Early Childhood Education—have been working on for years, building a patient, methodical, and subtly convincing body of evidence.When you walk into a preschool classroom that uses OMEP-informed practices, you might not realize right away that you are witnessing research in action. Kids arrange stones according to color. They transfer water between variously shaped containers. When a child fails at carefully balancing a block on…
The majority of people have at some point in their lives sat at a desk—at home, at work, or at school—and typed the ^ symbol without second thought. On almost all QWERTY keyboards, it sits silently above the 6 key, making it simple to ignore and forget. However, for well over three centuries, the caret, as it is officially called, has been quietly performing significant work in writing, mathematics, and computing. For something that most people couldn’t name on a good day, that’s a long run. The word itself is derived from the Latin caret, which means “it is lacking”…