ABSTRACT
Children’s sense of place develops early through active first-hand, meaningful experiences. Internationally, early childhood curricula position young children as agentic, competent and capable beings who have a right to participate in their locality and to care for it. In Ireland, the theme Identity and Belonging forms a core component of early childhood curricular and quality frameworks, where young children’s sense of ‘being in’ and ‘belonging to’ a community are emphasised; thereby developing a sense of ‘place’, forming an attachment with the precise area in which they live. This chapter shows how young children are present in their environments, and how through being observers in their localities themselves, they develop an understanding of local places, developing emergent geo-literacy skills. This chapter documents how young children (three- to five-year-olds) in two preschool settings view, discuss and represent important spaces within their locality. Adopting an inquiry-based, emergent curriculum approach, the role of photos of local landmarks as a provocation for discussion and exploration are discussed along with detailing how young children represent their emerging understandings of local places in multi-modal ways, including block play, map-making, drawing and discussion.
