Ewan McVicar, one of Scotland's best-known storytellers and song writers, has collected songs in over 40 Scottish schools to create the first publications of the 'hidden' songs of Scots childhood. The songs featured include honest vulgarity, violence, football and anti-school ditties.

Nursery World Awards 2012 winner! This stimulating book brings together contributions from distinguished practitioners, who demonstrate how they have used educational methods advocated by Froebel in contemporary settings. Stressing the importance of outdoor play, they explore the Froebelian principles of: - Play - Learning through firsthand experience - Parent partnership and community in early childhood - Practitioners supporting children′s interests and learning - Finger rhymes and action songs - Movement - The garden and forests - Wooden blockplay - Use of clay, paint, junk modelling, construction kits The book emphasises how learning and the application of knowledge become possible through play. It contrasts the Froebel approach with the methods such as Montessori, Steiner and recent approaches to play such as post-Modern ′playfulness′. This book is relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students of Early Childhood Education, as well as students following QTS and EYPS, PGCE, CPD and BEd courses. Tina Bruce CBE is an Honorary Visiting Professor in Early Childhood at the University of Roehampton.

Adults may lament that today's children do not sing in the playground, but the kids know better. Funny, imaginative, shocking and nonsensical rhymes and songs are as much in evidence today as they always were. In this book, one of Scotland's best-known storytellers introduces hundreds of such rhymes from all over the country. Some date back hundreds of years; many others have been collected on the author's personal visits to schools. The result is an entertaining anthology which also offers a fascinating insight into the minds of Scottish children over the years.

Elizabeth Stewart is a highly acclaimed singer, pianist and accordionist whose reputation has spread widely not only as an outstanding musician but as the principal inheritor and advocate of her family and their music. First discovered by folklorists in the 1950s, the Stewarts of Fetterangus, including Elizabeth's mother Jean, her uncle Ned, and her aunt Lucy, have had immense musical influence. Lucy in particular became a celebrated ballad singer and in 1961 Smithsonian Folkways released a collection of her classic ballad recordings that brought the family's music and name to an international.

John Shaw Neilson (1872-1942) is Australia's great lyric poet. A new introduction by Dr Helen Hewson explores some of the influences which have shaped Neilson's poetry.

From conkers to marbles, from British Bulldog to tag, not forgetting 'one potato, two potato' and 'eeny, meeny, miny, mo', The Lore of the Playground looks at the games children have enjoyed, the rhymes they have chanted and the rituals and traditions they have observed over the past hundred years and more. Each generation, it emerges, has had its own favourites - hoops and tops in the 1930s, clapping games more recently. Some pastimes, such as skipping, have proved remarkably resilient, their complicated rules carefully handed down from one class to the next. Many are now the stuff of distant memory. And some traditions have proved to be strongly regional, loved by children in one part of the country, unknown to those elsewhere. All are brilliantly and meticulously recorded by Steve Roud, who has drawn on interviews with hundreds of people aged from 8 to 80 to create a fascinating picture of all our childhoods.

Ewan McVicar, one of Scotland’s best-known storytellers and song writers, has collected songs in over 40 Scottish schools to create this new condensed compendium of the ‘hidden’ songs of Scots childhood. Adults may lament that today’s Scots children do not sing in the playground, but the kids know better. As he demonstrated in his critically acclaimed Doh Ray Me, When Ah Wis Wee, hundreds of hilarious, energetic, surreal, nonsensical and alarming rhymes and songs are still in use, some over 200 years old, others as new as today’s TV ads. It is a fascinating account of Scots children’s lyric lore and investigates what has been lost and what has replaced it, looking at the arcane riches of the past as well as the absurd glories of today.