Start together on a lifetime of learning-- the greatest gift youcan give your child A special greeting for a guest...a new way of looking at a familiarfairy tale...a day of exploration around your town. These simpleexperiences and activities help your child understand how to getalong with family, friends, and neighbors--from around the block toaround the world. Early childhood education specialist Marlene Barron shows you howto stimulate your child's natural desire to relate to others with60 imaginative and entertaining activities. Each one is: * Inspired by the internationally renowned Montessori approach toeducation * Developed especially for children ages 3 to 7 * Aimed at achieving specific objectives, such as understandingbasic social skills, learning about diverse cultures, anddeveloping an appreciation of history and the arts * Readily upgraded to keep pace with your child's progress * Easy to do and loads of fun! The Ready, Set, Learn series was created to help parents andchildren explore concepts and develop skills necessary to succeedin school. In addition to dozens of activities, each book containsa substantial overview explaining children's developmental needs.Also available in the Ready, Set, Learn series: Ready, Set, Readand Write; Ready, Set, Count; and Ready, Set, Explore. "Marlene Barron's special understanding of people--children,parents, teachers--has led to these very special books. Theactivities here will allow children to construct a deeper, morecomplex understanding of their world and will be fun for bothparent and child. I recommend these books to anyone who works withchildren." --John Chattin-McNichols, Ph.D. Associate Professor,School of Education, Seattle University; Vice President, AmericanMontessori Society

Start together on a lifetime of learning-- the greatest gift youcan give your child A trip to the supermarket. A drive to the mall. A refrigerator. Atelephone. A television. Transform these everyday experiences andhousehold items into a world of words and wonder for yourchild. Early childhood education specialist Marlene Barron shows you howto stimulate your child's natural interest in reading and writingby sharing 60 imaginative and entertaining activities. Each one is: * Inspired by the internationally renowned Montessori approach toeducation * Developed especially for children ages 3 to 7 * Aimed at achieving specific objectives, such as increasingvocabulary, letter formation, sequencing, listening and motorskills, and more * Readily upgraded to keep pace with your child's progress * Easy to do and loads of fun! The Ready, Set, Learn series was created to help parents andchildren explore concepts and develop skills necessary to succeedin school. In addition to dozens of activities, each book containsa substantial overview explaining children's developmental needs.Also available in the Ready, Set, Learn series: Ready, Set, Count;Ready, Set, Explore; Ready, Set, Cooperate. "Marlene Barron's special understanding of people--children,parents, teachers--has led to these very special books. Theactivities here will allow children to construct a deeper, morecomplex understanding of their world and will be fun for bothparent and child. I recommend these books to anyone who works withchildren." --John Chattin-McNichols, Ph.D. Associate Professor,School of Education, Seattle University Vice President, AmericanMontessori Society

J.L. Gili’s selection of Lorca’s poems in Spanish, with his own unassuming prose versions as guides to the originals, first appeared in 1960. With its excellent introduction and selection it remains a perfect introductory guide to the great poet. The book is ideal for newcomers to Lorca who know, or are prepared to grapple with, a little Spanish. It influenced a generation of readers and poets, including Ted Hughes who first encountered Lorca through this book. Spain’s most celebrated modern poet, Federico García Lorca was born in 1898 near Granada. Poet, dramatist, musician and artist, he was the author of The Gypsy Ballad Book’ (1928) and Poet in New York’ (1940). After his return from New York and Cuba to Republican Spain in 1930, he devoted himself to the theatre, writing three tragedies including Blood Wedding’ (1933). An outspoken supporter of the Republic, he was assassinated at the height of his fame by Nationalist partisans in Granada in 1936, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War.

For the majority of students, the skills and work habits crucial to successful learning are not in place when they arrive at the school door. These skills must be explicitly taught by teachers who recognize the unique learning styles, preferences, and interests of their students. Ready, Set, Learn focuses on the importance of encouraging students to set their own learning goals and persevere to achieve them. It illustrates ways in which every lesson can be an opportunity for students to develop the skills and strategies they need in order to learn. Along with organizers, prompts, and specific activities, this timely book presents new ways to plan lessons that explicitly teach key learning skills, including organization, collaboration, communication, independence, memory, and initiative. This remarkable book shows how incorporating learning strategies into everyday work will improve students achievement, and create responsible, independent learners.

The NATO sponsored Advanced Study Institute 'The Biology and Tech nology of Intelligent Autonomous Agents' was an extraordinary event. For two weeks it brought together the leading proponents of the new behavior oriented approach to Artificial Intelligence in Castel Ivano near Trento. The goal of the meeting was to establish a solid scientific and technological foun dation for the field of intelligent autonomous agents with a bias towards the new methodologies and techniques that have recently been developed in Ar tificial Intelligence under the strong influence of biology. Major themes of the conference were: bottom-up AI research, artificial life, neural networks and techniques of emergent functionality. The meeting was such an extraordinary event because it not only featured very high quality lectures on autonomous agents and the various fields feeding it, but also robot laboratories which were set up by the MIT AI laboratory (with a lab led by Rodney Brooks) and the VUB AI laboratory (with labs led by Tim Smithers and Luc Steels). This way the participants could also gain practical experience and discuss in concreto what the difficulties and achievements were of different approaches. In fact, the meeting has been such a success that a follow up meeting is planned for September 1995 in Monte Verita (Switzerland). This meeting is organised by Rolf Pfeifer (University of Zurich).

More than sixty contributions in From Animals to Animats 2 byresearchers in ethology, ecology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and related fieldsinvestigate behaviors and the underlying mechanisms that allow animals and, potentially, robots toadapt and survive in uncertain environments. Jean-Arcady Meyer is Director of Research, CNRS, Paris.Herbert L. Roitblat is Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Stewart W.Wilson is a scientist at The Rowland Institute for Science, Cambridge,Massachusetts. Topics covered: The Animat Approach to Adaptive Behavior,Perception and Motor Control, Action Selection and Behavioral Sequences, Cognitive Maps and InternalWorld Models, Learning, Evolution, Collective Behavior.

Today, technologies for engineering and deployment of cooperative information systems have become increasingly critical in the construction of practically all types of large-scale distributed systems. Stimulating forums with different focuses are thus still in need of researchers and professionals from academia and industry to exchange ideas and experience and to establish working relationships. The idea to organize in China an academic event focusing on current topics in the field was born during the IFIP World Computer Congress 2000 that was held in Beijing, China. And here are the proceedings of EDCIS 2002! This volume comprises the technical research papers accepted for presentation at EDCIS 2002. Of the initial 159 paper submissions involving nearly 500 authors from 14 countries of all continents, 45 papers were carefully selected. Every paper was reviewed by at least three members of the program committee, and judged - cording to its technical merit and soundness, originality, significance, presentation quality, and relevance to the conference. The accepted papers cover various s- jects such as workflow technology, coordination technology, advanced trans- tions, groupware systems, semantic web, ontologies, mobile agents, and enterprise modeling, and enterprise application integration.