Guide to Locating Early Childhood Education Resources

Jennings Library provides numerous specialized resources designed for early childhood education.  Materials will be found in the following locations.

CURRICULUM LAB

Kits, Big Books, Math and Language Arts Manipulatives, Puppets: Most of these materials are oversize and are located in the early childhood education center under the windows.

Textbooks, Teacher’s Editions, Supplemental Teaching Materials: Most of these materials are included on the regular shelves in the Curriculum Lab. For a quick location guide, click here.

Contains curriculum on all subjects including early childhood education.  Provides instructional objectives and strategies, student activities, worksheets, lesson plans, subject matter and resource materials.

JUVENILE COLLECTION

A collection of juvenile books is located adjacent to the Curriculum Lab. It includes a complete collection of Caldecott Medal and Newbery Medal award books along with many other highly recommended books for young children.

  • Picture Books
  • Fiction
  • Non-Fiction

CIRCULATING COLLECTION

The Circulating Collection includes professional literature on teaching, child development, etc.  Check out 372.21 in the Circulating Collection for many practical teaching ideas.  In addition, some recommended subject headings are:

  • Child Development
  • Day Care Centers—United States
  • Early Childhood Education
  • Education, Preschool
  • Infants—Development
  • Language Arts (Early Childhood)
  • Nursery Schools
  • Play
  • Reading (Early Childhood)
  • Toddlers

RECOMMENDED PERIODICALS

There are many journals either in Jennings Library or available online through the Library’s databases that are especially useful for early childhood education.  A few recommended titles are:

  • Arts and Activities
  • Early Childhood Education Journal
  • Elementary School Journal
  • Instructor
  • Language Arts
  • School Arts
  • Teaching PreK - 8
  • Young Children

Use the journal locator on the library homepage to determine where the Jenning's Library has the journal (print, microfilm or databse).

PERIODICAL RESOURCES

Many other journals also contain articles related to early childhood education.  To identify these journals or to locate articles on specific topics, use the databases listed below.

Academic Search Premier - provides full-text for nearly 3,180 scholarly publications covering academic areas of study including social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, language and linguistics, arts and literature, medical sciences, and ethnic studies.

ERIC - a database from the Educational Resources Information Center. Consists of the Resources in Education (RIE) file of document citations and the Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE) file of journal article citations from over 980 professional journals. Includes abstracts for all citations.

Omni Full-Text - a cross-discipline database which combines and searches Education Abstracts, General Science Abstracts, Humanities Abstracts, Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, Business Abstracts, and Social Science Abstracts. Contains the full-text for some the articles.

Professional Development Collection is designed for professional educators, providing a highly specialized collection of 520 education journals, including nearly 350 peer-reviewed titles. In addition to full-text coverage, indexing and abstracts are provided for more than 700 journals. Funded by the New Jersey State Library.

Proquest Research Library - a general interest database covering popular to scholarly journals. Contains the full-text for some of the articles.

ProQuest Social Science Journals - full-text periodicals covering the social sciences. Education Journals contains leading journals in education and related fields with full-text articles. Criminal Justice Periodical Index contains abstracts and some full texts of articles from criminal justice literature. Psychology Journals provides full-text coverage from top psychology and related publications for both students and mental-health professionals. In ProQuest Social Science Journals, use the databases selected link to search any combination of the databases in this collection.

PsycINFO - covers psychology and the psychological aspects of related disciplines. Contains citations and abstracts only for journal articles, chapters, books, dissertations, and reports.

INTERNET RESOURCES

There are many resources for early childhood education available on the Internet: