Nine Easy-to-Do Plays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Winter Holidays, Valentine¿s Day, Community, Environment, Native American¿NEW, America¿NEW, History¿NEW

Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama. Carefully combing through the plays, Sergi seeks out cues in the dialogues that reveal information about the original staging, design, and acting. These “practical cues,” as he calls them, have gone largely unnoticed by drama scholars, who have focused on the ideology and historical contexts of these plays, rather than the methods, mechanics, and structures of the actual performances. Drawing on his experience as an actor and director, he combines close readings of these texts with fragments of records, revealing a new way to understand how the Chester plays brought biblical narratives to spectators in the noisy streets. For Sergi, plays that once appeared only as dry religious dramas come to life as raucous participatory spectacles filled with humor, camp, and devotion.

Can you really write a play that lasts a minute? The one minute play offers a unique challenge to actors, directors and writers: how do you create a whole world, where actors have room to perform and where audiences have a true experience all in 60 seconds? One Minute Plays: A Practical Guide to Tiny Theatre demystifies the super-short-form play, demonstrating that this rich, accessible format offers great energy and variety not only to audiences but to everyone involved in its creation and performance. This handbook includes: An anthology of 200 one-minute plays selected from the annual Gone in 60 Seconds festival. A toolbox of exercises, methodologies and techniques for educators, practitioners and workshop leaders at all levels. Tips and advice on the demands of storytelling, inclusivity and creative challenges. Detailed practical information about creating your own minute festival, including play selection, running order, staging and marketing. Drawing on a wealth of experience, Steve Ansell and Rose Burnett Bonczek present an invaluable guide for anyone intrigued by the art of creating, producing and performing a one minute play.

Play Practice: Engaging and Developing Skilled Players, Second Edition, provides an alternative to traditional sport instruction. This innovative and authentic approach to teaching sports combines contemporary theory with the experience of practical and reflective work in real sport environments. Coauthors Alan Launder and Wendy Piltz, both with wide-ranging experience as players, teachers, and coaches, expand and update the play practice approach they presented in the first edition and show how it can be used to help improve sport skills for players of all ages and abilities. This flexible model of sport pedagogy can be applied as a whole or one element at a time. It covers a wide range of team and individual sports, including archery, table tennis, flag football, snow skiing, cricket, and track and field. Plus, you’ll find a wealth of field-tested ideas for working with diverse learners in schools and communities. The second edition highlights the significance of key terms such as games sense, technique, resilience, and fair play. It also provides new information relating to the complexity of learning and addresses the difficulties beginners face in the learning process. The second edition of Play Practice integrates a thorough analysis of skilled performance with an understanding of the conditions under which people best learn. It also shows how the strategies of simplifying, shaping, focusing, and enhancing can help you create situations to maximize learning and positively influence the attitudes of learners. Over 130 illustrations and photos demonstrate specific approaches, ideas that can work for multiple sports, and ways to apply the approach with beginners through elite players. Summary sections in each chapter help you quickly identify and review key topics. And two bonus chapters about the origins, evolution, and theoretical bases for Play Practice are available free for download at www.HumanKinetics.com/PlayPractice. Play Practice is based on the idea that an individual’s commitment to achieving mastery is a powerful motivator for learning. Learn to harness these motivators and create enjoyable practice situations in which learners young and old, whether resistant beginners or highly motivated professionals, are encouraged to strive for excellence.

This book provides the background, theoretical underpinnings and the process and principles of Learn to Play Therapy. Learn to Play Therapy has been developed and refined for over 25 years. This book is written for therapists who work with children aged 12 months to 8 years. It is a therapeutic approach for children with autism spectrum disorder, developmental difficulties, and children who find playing spontaneously, perplexing. Learn to Play Therapy focusses on building a child's ability to self-initiate spontaneous pretend play ability. Pretend play is associated with social competence, narrative, language, self-regulation, creativity and problem solving. The book is a complete revision of the first edition Learn to Play book which was published by Co-ordinates Publications. The second edition is 314 pages and includes 114 play activities, parent handouts, and a Play Background Checklist. A USB is provided with the book and contains the printable pages. Play assessment is the first step in Learn to Play Therapy as an understanding of a child's self-initiated pretend play ability informs which play activities to choose to begin the therapeutic process. The Pretend Play Enjoyment Developmental Checklist (Stagnitti, 2017) and the Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment 2 (Stagnitti, 2019) are recommended to be used with Learn to Play Therapy. The theoretical underpinnings of Learn to Play Therapy are informed by Axline, Vygotsky, and the neurobiology of play. The process and principles are explained in depth with Chapters 1 to 3 providing an unfolding explanation, starting with an overview and becoming more detailed across the three Chapters. This second edition also has a chapter on working with parents, questions and answers, and case studies. The play skills cover: engaging activities for those children who show no enjoyment or understanding of play; pre-pretend play activities for children who require therapy to begin on the very early levels of play; and the pretend play skills of sequences of play action, describing and explaining, object substitution, doll/teddy play, play scripts, role play, social pretend play, attributing properties and absent objects, problems in the play and predicting what will happen next. An extensive reference list is included.

Forget the 10,000 hour rule— what if it’s possible to learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or less? Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches: Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better. Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first. Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice. Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve. Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.

This extremely practical and child-focused book gives you the tools you need to make sure all the children in your care are included and involved in the play opportunities of your setting. Inside the second edition, new content includes: - consideration of the early years curricula across the whole of the UK - a new chapter on risk and challenge in play - new case studies - international perspectives - full coverage of the Birth to Eight age range - consideration of inclusive play from a children′s rights perspective A key book for those in practice, and underpinned by sound theory, this book will help you encourage and support inclusive play throughout your setting; it is packed with activities for you to try, ideas for small changes to make that can have a big impact and clear guidance on writing a play policy. With a focus on appreciating children as individuals, this book is essential for all early years practitioners and those studying early years at any level. Theresa Casey is a freelance consultant based in Scotland, and President of the International Play Association. Specialising in play and children′s rights, inclusion and children′s environments, Theresa Casey Consultancy provides tailor-made services for organisations working for and with children.