A little science, a little arts and crafts, a little math, a lot creative and a whole lot of fun! This packet is full of activities and ideas that give free reign to students' curiosity and stretch their creativity. There are opportunities to investigate, create and discover in all areas of the curriculum. Clear step-by-step instructions make the activities easy and fun for students, while the aims and objectives, extension activities and assessment tools make it a helpful resource for teachers.

Anyone who likes to play in mud, playdough, papier-mache and similar mediums will love this book of over 125 clays, doughs, and modeling mixtures you can make yourself. The first chapter alone has 31 playdough recipes! Mudworks uses common household materials and requires no expertise. Ideal for fun or serious art for all ages, for home, school, or childcare. Also available in a bilingual Spanish and English version in eBook format, "Mudworks Bilingual". 1990 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award 1990 American Library Association (ALA) Starred Review 1995 ALA "Best of the Best" Books & Media for Children

Growing with Gardening offers step-by-step guidance in planning a year-round horticultural program for therapy, recreation, or education. Developed under the auspices of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, it features more than 250 activities, organized by month, ranging from designing a raised plant bed and building a wheelchair-accessible garden to constructing a plant press and creating crafts from natural plant materials. More than 200 illustrations complement the clear, concise text.

Published under the auspices of the New York Public Library, this expanded, reorganized and updated edition of Resources for Early Childhood: An Annotated Guide for Educators, Librarians, Health Care Professionals, and Parents (1985), includes new essays by the most important theorists in the early childhood field today. Influential classic works as well as recent works are listed and annotated in the new bibliographies. Essayists include Marian Wright Edelman on the hardships of America's young families; Bettye Caldwell on Educare; Lewis Lipsitt on assessment of deficits in children; Louise Bates Ames on developmental readiness for schooling; Nicholas Anastasiow on oral language development; Urie Bronfenbrenner on changes in family life and child care; Irving Lazar on education policy; Bob McGrath on recorded children's music; Michael Lewis on emotional development in preschool children; Michael Meyerhoff on toy selection; David Elkind on young children in the post-modern world; Mary Dean Dumais on the kindergarten curriculum; Vincent Fontana on child abuse; Dorothy Singer on television and children's overall development; Lendon Smith on nutrition, health, AIDS and the environment; Edward Zigler on family support programs; Stella Chess on temperament; Bernard Spodek on choosing appropriate early childhood programs; David Weikart on the importance of early childhood education. A subject index is included.

A stimulating, do-it-yourself, inventive resource packed with cross-curriculum science and design and technology projects that children can put together themselves and which really work. Uses child's natural curiosity to develop creative problem-solving skills.

Literature-based activities designed to be used with How to dig a hole to the other side of the world and The Magic School Bus inside the earth.

The postwar American stereotypes of suburban sameness, traditional gender roles, and educational conservatism have masked an alternate self-image tailor-made for the Cold War. The creative child, an idealized future citizen, was the darling of baby boom parents, psychologists, marketers, and designers who saw in the next generation promise that appeared to answer the most pressing worries of the age. Designing the Creative Child reveals how a postwar cult of childhood creativity developed and continues to this day. Exploring how the idea of children as imaginative and naturally creative was constructed, disseminated, and consumed in the United States after World War II, Amy F. Ogata argues that educational toys, playgrounds, small middle-class houses, new schools, and children’s museums were designed to cultivate imagination in a growing cohort of baby boom children. Enthusiasm for encouraging creativity in children countered Cold War fears of failing competitiveness and the postwar critique of social conformity, making creativity an emblem of national revitalization. Ogata describes how a historically rooted belief in children’s capacity for independent thinking was transformed from an elite concern of the interwar years to a fully consumable and aspirational ideal that persists today. From building blocks to Gumby, playhouses to Playskool trains, Creative Playthings to the Eames House of Cards, Crayola fingerpaint to children’s museums, material goods and spaces shaped a popular understanding of creativity, and Designing the Creative Child demonstrates how this notion has been woven into the fabric of American culture.