Let's go back to the time of rotary phones, party lines, TV screens that were fifteen inches, and the beginning of rock and roll. What was it like growing up in a Housing Authority project? Take a journey throughtime withnine friends in the fifties, as they try to show you kids are the same yesteryear as they are today. Or are they? Faith,friendship, and loyalty are the key words of the book. This book will make you laugh, cry, and wonder were the fifties the good old days. So when your grandkids ask,"How was it when you weregrowing up?"Hand them this book!Coach Mike Manley is a retired New York City physical education teacher. He often states there are 17,500 former students walking around sore from the thousands of pushups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, and chain breakers they did in hisclass His love of teaching, coaching, sports, and faith canbe traced back to his days growing up in a housing project. His book the Project Kids: Takes Us back to the 1950s.Many of the adventures with his eight friends will make you laugh, cry, and wonder how they grew up in such a small part of the world. Mike's book took forty-eight years in the making, and now he can check it off his bucket list.Mike still coaches on Cape Cod where he lives with his wife Carol.

2008 — ALLA Prize for Best Book on Latina/o Anthropology The Pico Gardens housing development in East Los Angeles has a high percentage of resident families with a history of persistent poverty, gang involvement, and crime. In some families, members of three generations have belonged to gangs. Many other Pico Gardens families, however, have managed to avoid the cycle of gang involvement. In this work, Vigil adds to the tradition of poverty research and elaborates on the association of family dynamics and gang membership. The main objective of his research was to discover what factors make some families more vulnerable to gang membership, and why gang resistance was evidenced in similarly situated non-gang-involved families. Providing rich, in-depth interviews and observations, Vigil examines the wide variations in income and social capital that exist among the ostensibly poor, mostly Mexican American residents. Vigil documents how families connect and interact with social agencies in greater East Los Angeles to help chart the routines and rhythms of the lives of public housing residents. He presents family life histories to augment and provide texture to the quantitative information. By studying life in Pico Gardens, Vigil feels we can better understand how human agency interacts with structural factors to produce the reality that families living in all public housing developments must contend with daily.

Perfect for crafty parents who are eager to get their kids excited about DIY, ProjectKid is everything you could want in a craft book: 100(!) stylish, inventive projects; step-by-step photographs; tips for the novice crafter; easy-to-follow instructions; and a fresh, modern look. What really sets these projects apart are the unexpected, ingenious ways Kingloff uses everyday objects and materials. (Did you ever think a body-wash bottle would make a perfect rocket ship?) And these are projects for things kids want to make—and keep—from a juice-box owl to a pirate ship to a curio cabinet for displaying all of their treasures, plus games, jewelry, and more. Also included in the book are basic crafting lessons (such as pom-pom making and weaving) to help children of all ages build a DIY arsenal, a handy guide to must-have tools and materials, and a source directory.

Thomas the Tank Engine. Hot Wheels. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. Kids’ fascination with vehicles is insatiable. In Project Kid: Crafts That Go!, that excitement is translated into more than 60 inventive craft projects for parents to make with and for their children. The book is organized into seven chapters: City, Rails, Sky, Space, Water, Country, and Dirt. There are police cars and ice cream trucks; circus trains and submarines; helicopters, rocket ships, cement mixers, and school buses. And because the car-obsessed kid doesn’t just want a new vehicle to play with—he wants a racetrack, his very own driver’s license, maybe even a child-sized gas station—each chapter includes not only toys but also thematic clothing, decor, accessories, and more. Projects feature clear instructions and step-by-step photographs wherever they are needed, easy for both kids and non-crafty adults to understand.

• Big collection of fun crafts for children to make from sheets of craft foam. • Any boy or girl ages 4 to 10 can complete any of these easy projects with minimal supervision. • Kids learn to make puppets, pencil toppers, masks, head bobbers, animal boxes, purses, belt pockets, refrigerator magnets, and more. • Clear photos, supply lists, easy-to follow instructions, and full size patterns. • Perfect for parties, rainy days, camp activities, and after-school projects.

As a developmental psychologist with a strong interest in children's re sponse to the physical environment, I take particular pleasure in writing a foreword to the present volume. It provides impressive evidence of the con cern that workers in environmental psychology and environmental design are displaying for the child as a user of the designed environment and indi cates a recognition of the need to apply theory and findings from develop mental and environmental psychology to the design of environments for children. This seems to me to mark a shift in focus and concern from the earlier days of the interaction between environmental designers and psy chologists that occurred some two decades ago and provided the impetus for the establishment of environmental psychology as a subdiscipline. Whether because children-though they are consumers of designed environments are not the architect's clients or because it seemed easier to work with adults who could be asked to make ratings of environmental spaces and comment on them at length, a focus on the child in interaction with en vironments was comparatively slow in developing in the field of environ ment and behavior. As the chapters of the present volume indicate, that situation is no longer true today, and this is a change that all concerned with the well-being and optimal functioning of children will welcome.