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'Children's Play' explores the many facets of play and how it develops from infancy through late childhood. The authors discuss major revolutions in the way the children of today engage in play, including changes in organised youth sports children's humour, and electronic play.
Understanding Children's Play offers a full exploration of children's play from babyhood through to the early years of primary school. It explores how their play is shaped by time and place and supports early years practitioners and playworkers.
Young Children’s Play: Development, Disabilities, and Diversity is an accessible, comprehensive introduction to play and development from birth to age 8 years that introduces readers to various play types and strategies and helps them determine when intervention might be needed. Skillfully addressing both typically developing children and those with special needs in a single volume, this book covers dramatic play, blocks, games, motor play, artistic play, and non-traditional play forms, such as humor, rough and tumble play, and more. Designed to support contemporary classrooms, this text deliberately interweaves practical strategies for understanding and supporting the play of children with specific disabilities (e.g. autism, Down syndrome, or physically challenging conditions) and those of diverse cultural backgrounds into every chapter. In sections divided by age group, Trawick-Smith explores strategies for engaging children with specific special needs, multicultural backgrounds, and incorporating adult–child play and play intervention. Emphasizing diversity in play behaviors, each chapter includes vignettes featuring children’s play and teacher interactions in classrooms to illustrate core concepts in action. Filled with research-based applications for professional practice, this text is an essential resource for students of early childhood and special education, as well as teachers and coaches supporting early grades or inclusive classrooms.
This book illuminates play as a universal and culture-specific activity. It provides needed information about the behavior of children in diverse cultural contexts as well as about the play of children in unassimilated cultural or subcultural contexts. It offers readers the opportunity to develop greater sensitivity to and better understanding of the important cultural differences that confront early childhood teachers and teacher educators.
A thought-provoking re-examination of children's play drawing together insights and experiences across fields such as education, sociology, philosophy and psychology to encourage an inter-disciplinary approach.
This book provides an analysis of children’s play across many different cultural communities around the globe. Each chapter discusses children’s play as an activity important for formal and informal education, mental health and childhood well-being, and children’s hobbies and past-times. Traditional, modern and postmodern play forms are discussed and probed for their meaning within a contemporary global community. Authors address the functions that this phenomenon serves for indigenous cultures and the problems that arise due to the globalization of educational and social resources. Issues that are covered include the importance of conceptualizing the relationship between play and culture, how play varies both within and between cultures, children’s non-play activities in relation to play activities, how play is learned and how adults, parents and teachers, as well as older peers and siblings, are all important influences on the play of children. Questions that are raised include: Is it fair to emphasize the importance of certain kinds of play, such as social pretense play? Is this ethnocentric? Is the mastery of certain forms of play (e.g. socio-dramatic play) during the early years critical in the acculturation process? How are different cultures incorporating literacy props in play, or otherwise developing early educational programmes that use play educationally to foster literacy acquisition? These and many other questions or issues are taken up in this volume. At the heart of the book is a focus on human rights, in particular the Child’s Right to Play as stated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The book is committed to the principle of all children reaching their full potential and the enhancement of their families, communities, and cultures through play.
This book provides new theoretical insights to our understanding of play as a cultural activity. All chapters address play and playful activities from a cultural-historical theoretical approach by re-addressing central claims and concepts in the theory and providing new models and understandings of the phenomenon of play within the framework of cultural historical theory. Empirical studies cover a wide range of institutional settings: preschool, school, home, leisure time, and in various social relations (with peers, professionals and parents) in different parts of the world (Europe, Australia, South America and North America). Common to all chapters is a goal of throwing new light on the phenomenon of playing within a theoretical framework of cultural-historical theory. Play as a cultural, collective, social, personal, pedagogical and contextual activity is addressed with reference to central concepts in relation to development and learning. Concepts and phenomena related to ZPD, the imaginary situation, rules, language play, collective imagining, spheres of realities of play, virtual realities, social identity and pedagogical environments are presented and discussed in order to bring the cultural-historical theoretical approach into play with contemporary historical issues. Essential as a must read to any scholar and student engaged with understanding play in relation to human development, cultural historical theory and early childhood education.
This draws on the voices of practitioners, academics and researchers to examine young children’s play, creativity and learning. With a range of international perspectives, it focuses on the level of engagement and exploration involved in children’s play and how it can be facilitated in different contexts and cultures.
