Responding to current debates on the place of play in schools, the authors have extensively revised their groundbreaking book. They explain how and why play is a critical part of children’s development, as well as the central role adults have to promote it. This classic textbook and popular practitioner resource offers systematic descriptions and analyses of the different roles a teacher adopts to support play, including those of stage manager, mediator, player, scribe, assessor, communicator, and planner. This new edition has been expanded to include significant developments in the broadening landscape of early learning and care, such as assessment, diversity and culture, intentional teaching, inquiry, and the construction of knowledge. New for the Second Edition of The Play’s the Thing! Additional theories on the relationship of teachers and children’s play, e.g., Vygotsky and the role of imaginary play and Reggio Emilia’s image of the competent child.Current issues from media content, consumer culture, and environmental concerns.Standards and testing in preschool and kindergarten.Bridging the cultural gap between home and school.Using digital technology to make children’s play visible.Recent brain development research.And much more! Elizabeth Jones is faculty emerita in human development at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California. Gretchen Reynolds is on the faculty in the early childhood education program at Algonquin College in Ottawa, Canada. Their other books on play include Master Players (Reynolds & Jones) and Playing to Get Smart (Jones & Cooper). “The Play’s the Thing provides an excellent summary of theories related to the importance of children's play and illustrates the six roles teachers can use to put these theories into practice.” —Harvard Educational Review “This book describes the knowledge that is required to foster play and to use it as a solid foundation on which to build learning.” —From the Foreword to the First Edition by Elizabeth Prescott, Faculty Emerita, Pacific Oaks College “Playful learning offers educators a plan for creating fun and engaging pedagogies that support rich curricula. . . . And this book offers magnificent descriptions and evidence-based examples of how teachers can pave this new road and create a climate for learning via play.” —From the Foreword to the Second Edition by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, University of Delaware

P.G. Wodehouse's adaptation of Jatek a Kastelyban (The Play in the Castle) brings Ferenc Molnar's classic comedy to a wider audience. The play is a romantic farce without the usual door-slamming and comic entrances and exits. Instead, we are treated to a party of guests seemingly overhearing a lover's tryst, only to find (with the help of a very quick-witted playwright) that they are actually hearing something very different. The play combines beautifully formed characters with an exquisite text.

The year was 1569 and the place was Stratford-on-Avon. A little boy watched a company of traveling actors perform on a makeshift stage. No one could have known that the child, whose name was William Shakespeare, would one day become the most famous playwright in history. This is the story of the man who wrote Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and many other plays that have been performed and enjoyed again and again for more than four hundred years.

P.G. Wodehouse's adaptation of Jatek a Kastelyban (The Play in the Castle) brings Ferenc Molnar's classic comedy to a wider audience. The play is a romantic farce without the usual door-slamming and comic entrances and exits. Instead, we are treated to a party of guests seemingly overhearing a lover's tryst, only to find (with the help of a very quick-witted playwright) that they are actually hearing something very different. The play combines beautifully formed characters with an exquisite text.

The traditional role for teachers in children's play was to structure it, setting rules and interrupting if things got "out of hand". However, for children three to five, sociodramatic play is a way to invent and make familiar the rhythms and actions of everyday life. This text describes why play is a fundamentally important part of children's development and shows how adults can support and promote play. The authors offer systematic descriptions and analyses of the different roles a teacher adopts toward this end, including those of stage manager, mediator, player, scribe, assessor, communicator, and planner, and describe both highly interactive and inhibited children from different economic backgrounds. The authors integrate cognitive and psycho-dynamic theory as well, regarding the scripts children play in both cognitive and affective terms, and they discuss the importance of fantasy and reality play themes, demonstrating the implications of play for literacy learning.

The Play"s The Thing: The Plays of William Shakespeare is aimed at a YA (young adult) audience as an introduction to the greatest plays ever written. Direct and personal and decidedly non-academic, each play gets its own essay, giving the reader an overview of the play with an emphasis on the relevance that the play has to the reader"s own life and concerns. As I wrote in the introduction, "The goal of this guide, then, is to turn Shakespeare from somebody you have to read into somebody that you want to read." A young man struggles with his father s unexpected death. A young couple pledges their love to each other despite their families angry disapproval. A young man rebels against his father while at the same time craving his approval. A father and his family roam across what appears to be a post-apocalyptic dystopian landscape. A Roman general kills the sons of his enemy and serves them to her baked in a pie. Two young couples escape into a forest where magic rules and nothing is quite what it seems. A group of young men decide to give up on women and dating in order to devote themselves to their studies, until a group of beautiful young women changes their minds. The latest YA novels? While they certainly sound like they can be, they re not. They re just one way of looking at some of the plays of William Shakespeare (to be precise, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Henry IV Parts I & 2, King Lear, Love s Labour s Lost) that shows that they re not just old-school classic plays they re old-school classic plays that tell stories that are relevant to my life, to your lives, and to the way we all live today. These are stories of love. Of families. Of fathers and sons. Of the rise and fall of kings. Of what it s like to grow old. Of what it s like to love someone so much it hurts. Of treachery and revenge. Of ambition. Of jealousy. Of forgiveness. Of murder. Almost every human experience you can think of is brought to life in these plays. Which is why, for more than 400 years, they have been seen as the central glory of Western literature. And that s also why the plays of William Shakespeare are, on a daily basis, performed on stages around the world. The stories he told, the characters he created, are universal. Audiences in China, in Ghana, in India, in Brazil, in every part of the world, can appreciate and love Shakespeare as much as the British and Americans.