Olivia N. Saracho is Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. She is a former bilingual teacher, and has taught Head Start, preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school classes. Her current research and writing is in the field of early childhood education, and she has conducted research on children’s play, emergent literacy, and family literacy. She is co-author of Foundations of early childhood education (with Spodek and Davis, 1991), Right from the start: Teaching children ages three to eight (with Spodek, 1994), Dealing with Individual differences in the early childhood classroom (with Spodek, 1994), and An integrated play-based curriculum for young children (2012); and co-editor of the Handbook of Research Methods in Early Childhood Education (2014).