The Possibilities Of Play

Thoughtfully created learning centers are bubbling with opportunities for active learning. Dr. Jean, beloved author of dozens of books and songs, and coauthor Carolyn Kisloski bring you a collection of practical ideas and tips to inspire engagment and spark learning in your classroom centers--and, importantly, keep children coming back for more. Children learn best through play. Discover how you can help them thrive in your learning centers. The Possibilities of Play brings expert tips for selecting and managing materials, facilitating explorations, and challenging children to: explore on their own time and at their own level, engage in hands-on discovery, solve problems and use critical-thinking skills, practice emerging skills across domains, share and get along with others, develop language, and realize their own sense of creativity.

Playing with Possibilities sits at the heart of all creative endeavours. This collection brings together a multidisciplinary group of thinkers and writers to explore the potential of play to shape and reshape who we are and the worlds in which we live. It offers a series of encounters with playful possibilities, and asks us to question, consider and ultimately celebrate the importance of fanciful approaches to living. This book is a companion to The Possibilities of Creativity (2016).

Planning is central to the role of any early years practitioner and involves careful consideration of resources and the learning environment, learning outcomes, observation and assessment and the unique abilities of individual children. This is a big ask and in a busy setting it can be a challenge to adopt a flexible, creative approach to planning that embraces the unexpected rather than relying on templates or existing schemes of work. This book takes a fresh look at planning to consider the possibilities that should be encouraged when playing alongside young children. It shows how a creative approach that allows for spontaneous adventures in play through child-led projects leads to rich learning experiences that build on children's own interests. Drawing on practice from Reggio Emilia, New Zealand, Scandinavia and settings in the UK, the book covers all aspects of planning including: using observations of children to enable them to lead projects; organisation of indoor and outdoor learning environments; inclusive practice; learning through risk taking and adventure play; working with parents and carers; encouraging the team to consider different ways of working. Including encounters from authentic settings and provocative questions for reflective practice, this timely new text aims to give students and practitioners the confidence to adopt a flexible approach to planning that will better meet the needs of the children in their care. The authors are experienced lecturers, practitioners, mentors and assessors. Working with students, visiting placements, training teachers and early years professionals, they provide a sense of real purpose in their writing and enjoyment in the themes made explicit throughout this book.

This book reveals the nature, possibilities, and power of aesthetic play in teaching, learning, and researching at a middle school (Creative Arts Centre, Milton Williams School, Calgary, Alberta, Canada), which chooses to value the creating process across the entire school curriculum. Questions surface recursively throughout the book: What does it mean for teachers and students to experience and learn aesthetically? How is the aesthetic embodied in teachers' discourses and discursive patterns as well as in students' approaches to learning and in their work? What are the effects of learning through integration of the aesthetic into the school curriculum as a whole? The artistic form of collage acts as a literary device to address these questions from multiple perspectives.

“There are at least two kinds of games,” states James Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. “One could be called finite; the other infinite.” Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning, but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change—as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end. What are infinite games? How do they affect the ways we play our finite games? What are we doing when we play—finitely or infinitely? And how can infinite games affect the ways in which we live our lives? Carse explores these questions with stunning elegance, teasing out of his distinctions a universe of observation and insight, noting where and why and how we play, finitely and infinitely. He surveys our world—from the finite games of the playing field and playing board to the infinite games found in culture and religion—leaving all we think we know illuminated and transformed. Along the way, Carse finds new ways of understanding everything from how an actress portrays a role, to how we engage in sex, from the nature of evil, to the nature of science. Finite games, he shows, may offer wealth and status, power and glory. But infinite games offer something far more subtle and far grander. Carse has written a book rich in insight and aphorism. Already an international literary event, Finite and Infinite Games is certain to be argued about and celebrated for years to come. Reading it is the first step in learning to play the infinite game.

Describes play workshop experiences that give educators a deeper understanding of play-based learning and illustrate the power of play.

This volume brings together internationally renowned academics, arts practitioners and thinkers to take a multi-disciplinary look at the nature of the creative process and examine its possibilities for social and individual change. The book challenges the most common misconceptions about how we can be creative, and suggests that creativity is central to human survival.

Sutton-Smith focuses on play theories rooted in seven distinct "rhetorics"--The ancient discourses of fate, power, communal identity, and frivolity and the modern discourses of progress, the imaginary, and the self. In a sweeping analysis that moves from the question of play in child development to the implications of play for the Western work ethic, he explores the values, historical sources, and interests that have dictated the terms and forms of play put forth in each discourse's "objective" theory