The Place Of Play

A fascinating, eclectic analysis of the changing geographies of play in contemporary society.

Originally published in 1927, this was a book written specially for teachers and parents, based upon the writer’s practical experience and research. It deals with the fundamental importance of play in the child’s development and as a basis for all education. A set of 74 games, arranged by Miss Amy Whateley, is appended, in four groups according to the four play periods of childhood. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

Dominant assumptions about place tend to be defined in relation to urban communities. To assume a singular construction of urban places misrepresents the experiences, perspectives, and identities of urban children, making their identities become invisible to researchers, educators, and curriculum developers. Sharing a wide range of perspectives, Role of Place and Play in Young Children’s Language and Literacy sheds light on language and literacy learning in play-based early childhood settings where place plays an important role in teaching and learning. Drawing on geographic contexts, including northern rural and Indigenous communities, and giving voice to educational leaders in Indigenous professional learning contexts, as well as speech-language pathologists, this book joins forces with literacy and early childhood education researchers to create an interdisciplinary collage of theory, research, and practice. Bringing play and place together, a concept Shelley Stagg Peterson and Nicola Friedrich call playce-based learning, this book provides new and compelling ways to think about equity and educational opportunity in the language and literacy development of young children, and offers spaces for them to construct their own identities in positive ways.

»There's nothing really fun about the park in winter!« - Christina Ergler is the first one to explore why ›play‹ resonates differently across urban localities and seasons. She draws on Bourdieu's theory of practice and Gibson's affordance theory to show that determinants of seasonal outdoor play transcend modifiable barriers such as traffic and unsuitable play spaces as well as the inevitable issue of inclement weather. In contrast, seasonal play determinants are grounded in locally constituted beliefs about what is seasonally ›appropriate‹ children's activity. To foster a healthier and more sustainable life for children, outdoor play needs to become convenient all-year-round in all locations.

In Playborhood: Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Place for Play, you'll find inspiring stories of innovative communities throughout the US and Canada that have successfully created vibrant neighborhood play lives for their children. You'll also get a comprehensive set of step-by-step solutions to change your family and neighborhood cultures, so that your kids can spend less time in front of screens and in adult-supervised activities, and more time engaging in joyful neighborhood play.

Where do children go and what do they do outdoors? How do they evaluate their own environment? What are their likes and dislikes? What would they like to see added or changed? How can the outdoor environment support healthy child development? How is the impact of the environment affected by its social and physical characteristics? How can its developmental impact be strengthened through public policy? These are some of the questions addressed by Childhood’s Domain, originally published in 1986, in which children, as ‘expert’ research collaborators, describe their largely unseen life outdoors. On field trips to secret play places around their homes, in streets, in parks, and in places laid waste and abandoned by adult society, they reveal both the pleasure and difficulties of play in the city. A central concept of the book is a new term, terra ludens, which represents the accumulated developmental support that each child receives from her or his personal play spaces. Terra ludens reflects the degree to which each child acquires an intuitive sense of how the world is by playing with it. Field research for the book was conducted in London, Stevenage New Town and Stoke-on-Trent. Neighbourhood sites were deliberately chosen to contrast and compare children’s reactions to the characteristics of ‘big city’, ‘new town’ and ‘old industrial city’ environments. The most interesting experiences were encountered with children in Stoke-on-Trent. Here, in former mineral workings functioning as ‘playgrounds’ equipped with relics from the heyday of the industrial revolution, in new open spaces reclaimed from industrial ‘wastelands’, and in older parks dating from Victorian times, children demonstrated the creative possibilities of a landscape of opportunities lacking in the other two sites. Even so, children in all three sites revealed great ingenuity in making do with whatever resources they could find to create viable play environments for themselves.

In every province and county in Ireland, GAA grounds are cornerstones of culture and community. They are imbued with history and their terraces echo with the sounds of decades, even centuries, of spirited sporting battles. In this book, the first of its kind, Humphrey Kelleher has created a vibrant record of 101 GAA county grounds in every corner of the country. Each GAA ground featured has served as a county ground at some stage in its lifetime. Named for saints, landowners, political figures and more, every one has a unique and absorbing history. Alongside this fascinating information, the author chronicles the development of the grounds over the years, and the often surprising ways that funds were raised to do so. All thirty-two counties feature, and it doesn’t stop there; the book also takes us to London and to New York, where the grounds reflect the lasting and far-reaching influence of the GAA beyond these borders. With stunning new aerial drone photography by the author, this exceptional book offers an insightful new perspective on the places our GAA clubs and counties call home.

Delightful games and activities that use place-value blocks to give children practice in composing and decomposing numbers, skip counting, comparing numbers, and more.