Free Play


Book Description

Free Play is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about why we create and what we learn when we do. It is about the flow of unhindered creative energy: the joy of making art in all its varied forms. An international bestseller and beloved classic, Free Play is an inspiring and provocative book, directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own creative powers. It reveals how inspiration arises within us, how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed or obscured, and how finally it can be liberated—how we can be liberated—to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play, with our own authentic voice. Stephen Nachmanovitch, a pioneer in free improvisation, integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity, drawing on unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors. The whole enterprise of improvisation in life and art, of recovering free play and awakening creativity, is about being true to ourselves and our visions. Free Play brings us into direct, active contact with boundless creative energies that we may not even know we had.




1,001 Boredom Busting Play Ideas: Free and Low Cost Crafts, Activities, Games and Family Fun That Will Help You Raise Happy, Healthy Children


Book Description

AWESOME boredom busting play ideas—from creative crafts to zany new travel games! From mind-boggling science experiments to tricky challenges that will give your kids a case of the giggles. Written by New York Times bestselling author (and mom) Jean Oram. Beat the boredom blues with over 1,000 play ideas suitable for three-year-olds to eleven-year olds. There's something for everyone in this tried and tested book from NY Times bestselling author (and mom!), Jean Oram. "A lifesaver for parents and educators." --Kenneth, reader. Make it easy to say “no” to more screen time and “yes” to more play time with activities that will delight your children. Want to be the new favorite in the family? Check out some of the fun to be had with this one-of-a-kind book, 1,001 Boredom Busting Play Ideas: + 101 tricky, goofy challenges for kids + 36 Travel games PLUS 24 more games that can be played in the car + Arts and crafts (and holiday crafts, too) + Outside play ideas + Mad scientist safe & easy experiments--including Flubber! + Birthday party games + Family day trip ideas + Homeschool and classroom games + And more play, play, play! Includes 26 BONUS activities for a grand total of 1,027 activities to keep your kids happy! Have your best sleepover, birthday party, road tip, babysitting experience, snowy day, or homeschool play time ever! Play time is MORE than just crafts. The brain learns by playing. Build smarter, happier, healthier children... start with 1,001 Boredom Busting Play Ideas, because your kids deserve it. Keywords: crafts, crafts for kids, free play ideas, free range kids, antidote for helicopter parents, games for kids, challenges for kids, play ideas, game rules, game ideas, classic games, classic outdoor games, teacher resources, camp counselor idea books, Easter crafts, birthday party games, Christmas crafts, Halloween crafts, outdoor play ideas, family fun ideas, playcation, staycation ideas, family game night, family time, daycare resources, playschool resources, kindergarten resources, child development, empathy development, confidence building in kids, books for babysitters, keep kids busy, keep kids busy book, screen free play ideas, screen-free, healthy children, healthy kids, raising kids, raising children, how to raise kids, over scheduled kids, over scheduled children, over-scheduled kids, childhood anxiety, outdoor games, outdoor play, active play ideas, quiet play ideas, reading games, math games, travel games, family travel games.




Freedom in Practice


Book Description

‘Freedom’ is one of the most fiercely contested words in contemporary global experience. This book provides an up-to-date overview from an anthropological perspective of the diverse ways in which freedom is understood and practised in everyday life, including the emergent relationships between governance, autonomy and liberty. The contributors offer a wealth of ethnographic insight from a variety of geographic, cultural and political contexts. Taken together the essays constitute a radical challenge to assumptions about what freedom means in today’s world.




Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination


Book Description

This book presents a solution to the problem known in philosophical aesthetics as the paradox of ugliness, namely, how an object that is displeasing can retain our attention and be greatly appreciated. It does this by exploring and refining the most sophisticated and thoroughly worked out theoretical framework of philosophical aesthetics, Kant’s theory of taste, which was put forward in part one of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The book explores the possibility of incorporating ugliness, a negative aesthetic concept, into the overall Kantian aesthetic picture. It addresses a debate of the last two decades over whether Kant's aesthetics should allow for a pure aesthetic judgment of ugliness. The book critically reviews the main interpretations of Kant’s central notion of the free play of imagination and understanding and offers a new interpretation of free play, one that allows for the possibility of a disharmonious state of mind and ugliness. In addition, the book also applies an interpretation of ugliness in Kant’s aesthetics to resolve certain issues that have been raised in contemporary aesthetics, namely the possibility of appreciating artistic and natural ugliness and the role of disgust in artistic representation. Offering a theoretical and practical analysis of different kinds of negative aesthetic experiences, this book will help readers acquire a better understanding of his or her own evaluative processes, which may be helpful in coping with complex aesthetic experiences. Readers will gain unique insight into how ugliness can be offensive, yet, at the same time, fascinating, interesting and captivating.




Children’s Free Play and Participation in the City


Book Description

This book presents an interplay of imaginative memoir-telling, action research data and future projection that reminds and inspires experiences academics, researchers, professionals, as well as a wider public to recognize the fundamental importance and the impellent need for more and better work in favour of true political and societal recognition of the needs and rights of children to play freely, to participate, to live fully and enjoy their neighbourhoods and cities, and to imagine and construct alternative futures, together with adults. The book's abundant spoken dialogue is, in effect, storytelling between children (and youth) on their own and with adults (especially the elderly). It conveys an appreciation of children’s special capacities to think critically about their everyday places—and the greater world around them—and to develop solutions (or ‘projects’) for the problems they identify. This book serves an effective catalyst for stimulating rich discussion of the theoretical and practical bases of the many themes, or areas of study, which are treated in the story.




Play from Birth to Twelve


Book Description

In light of recent standards-based and testing movements, the issue of play in childhood has taken on increased meaning for educational professionals and social scientists. This second edition of Play From Birth to Twelve offers comprehensive coverage of what we now know about play, its guiding principles, its dynamics and importance in early learning. These up-to-date essays, written by some of the most distinguished experts in the field, help students explore: all aspects of play, including new approaches not yet covered in the literature how teachers in various classroom situations set up and guide play to facilitate learning how play is affected by societal violence, media reportage, technological innovations and other contemporary issues which areas of play have been studied adequately and which require further research.




Toy Stories


Book Description

Toys--those celebrated childhood cohorts and lead actors in children's imaginative play--have a fantastic history of heroism in fiction. From teddy bears that guard sleeping babies to plastic soldiers and cowboys who lay siege to wooden block castles, toys are often the heroes of the stories children inspire authors to tell. In this collection of new essays, scholars from a great range of disciplines examine fictional toys as protectors of the children they love, as heroes of their own stories, and as champions for the greater good in the writings of A.A. Milne, Hans Christian Andersen, William Joyce, John Lasseter and many others.







Boys and Girls


Book Description

In Boys and Girls, Vivian Paley has re-created a year of kindergarten teaching in which she explored the differences in the ways children play and fantasize.




Reading America


Book Description

This specially commissioned volume of essays offers a refreshing and unusual perspective on classic novels from the American literary canon. Accessible to students, scholars and the interested reader, this engaging collection explores familiar novels through unfamiliar lenses and, in so doing, sheds light on surprising and previously overlooked aspects of each text. Reading America presents a new approach to American literature by showcasing a cross-section of recent research into previously un-tapped areas of interest. Each chapter attempts to re-read classic American texts using new or unorthodox theoretical frameworks, including such diverse topics as an Emersonian reading of Don DeLillo, decoding Thomas Pynchon with eco-criticism and understanding Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy by exploring the graphic novel version of “City of Glass”. Other authors explored in this way include Henry James, Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This type of approach widens the reader’s knowledge of each well-known text and encourages new critical evaluations of contemporary American literature. The collection moves through six large topic areas, from Naturalism and an idea of the “Great American Novel” at the end of the nineteenth century, through politics, sexuality, language and nature, to a contemporary engagement with postmodernism. Each essay deals with its own particular subject and author, but the full impact of each on the notion of the “American novel” as a phenomenon can only be understood when read in conjunction with the others. Of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, Reading America would be a valuable asset to any American Studies or American Literature degree course, and a useful companion to American History or Politics courses. The volume will also attract strong interest from established academics, especially those researching the fields of literature, critical theory, cultural history and politics.