From a leading expert, a groundbreaking book on the science of play, and its essential role in fueling our happiness and intelligence throughout our lives. We've all seen the happiness on the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever...
The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Play: Brain-Building Interventions for Emotional Well-Being
The mental health field has seen a significant shift in the past decade toward including a neuroscience perspective when designing clinical interventions. However, for many play therapists it has been challenging to apply this information in the context of play therapy. Here, Theresa Kestly teaches therapists how to understand the...
History of Children’s Play and Play Environments – Toward a Contemporary Child-Saving Movement
Forward by Stuart Brown MD. Children’s play throughout history has been free, spontaneous, and intertwined with work, set in the playgrounds of the fields, streams, and barnyards. Children in cities enjoyed similar forms of play but their playgrounds were the vacant lands and parks. Today, children have become increasingly inactive,...
Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
A leading expert in childhood development makes the case for why self-directed learning -- "unschooling" -- is the best way to get kids to learn. In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that in order to foster children who will thrive in today's constantly changing world, we must...
A Mandate for Playful Learning in Preschool: Presenting the Evidence
Efforts to give preschool children a head start on academic skills like reading and mathematics instead rob them of play time both at home and school. Indeed, the scientific evidence suggests that eliminating play from the lives of children is taking preschool education in the wrong direction. This brief but...
Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth
Why is it that the best and brightest of our children are arriving at college too burned out to profit from the smorgasbord of intellectual delights that they are offered? Why is it that some preschools and kindergartens have a majority of children struggling to master cognitive tasks that are...
Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn–and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less
In Einstein Never Used Flashcards highly credentialed child psychologists, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D., with Diane Eyer, Ph.D., offer a compelling indictment of the growing trend toward accelerated learning. It’s a message that stressed-out parents are craving to hear: Letting tots learn through play is not only...
Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children
Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games (1961) stands alongside Brian Sutton-Smith’s The Ambiguity of Play (1997) and Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) as a touchstone of play theory. In just a few years, today's children and teens will forge careers that look nothing like those their parents and grandparents knew....
The Wisdom of Play – How Children Learn to Make Sense of the World
A very short, free booklet that concisely covers the importance of play in childhood. Contains sections by leading experts on play and child development. Click the publisher link to download a PDF of the booklet.
The Recess Project Changemaker’s Guide – Blueprints for a new way to do recess
The Resources Project works with schools to support meaningful, inclusive opportunities for social connection, mindfulness, creativity, and all kinds of play. Their award-winning, evidence-based Recess Project Changemaker's Guide was designed to disrupt the outdated routines and replace them with healthy, inclusive and compassionate interactions. It is the product of a...
The Handbook of the Study of Play
The Handbook of the Study of Play brings together in two volumes thinkers whose diverse interests at the leading edge of scholarship and practice define the current field. Because play is an activity that humans have shared across time, place, and culture and in their personal developmental timelines—and because this...
Playful Awakening – Releasing the Gift of Play in Your Life
Forward by Stuart Brown MD Playfulness has the power to reconnect us with our sense of self, and help us achieve growth and self-fulfilment. The author of this wide-ranging book explores the universal significance of play in the pursuit of happiness and authenticity. Providing a brief overview of the role...
Authentic relationships in group Care for Infants and Toddlers
Underpinned by substantive research on meeting the developmental and attachment needs of infants, this book offers constructive advice on how to encourage curiosity, confidence and emotional security in young children. Based on a philosophy of respect and sensitive observation of infants, it is appropriate for use in Sure Start programmes....
Child Development, 7th ed.
A best-selling, topically organized child development text, Berk's Child Development is relied on in classrooms worldwide for its clear, engaging writing style, exceptional cross-cultural and multi-cultural focus, rich examples, and long-standing commitment to presenting the most up-to-date scholarship while also offering students research-based, practical applications that they can relate to...
Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows
Occasionally an accident of research produces a book more engaging than the one the historian originally intended. While sifting through material for his Ph.D. dissertation, which dealt with an entirely different topic, Eisen came across a diary from the Vilna ghetto written by Zelig Kalmanovitch. His tone was sober, but...
Children at Play: An American History
A chronological history of children's playtime over the last 200 years If you believe the experts, “child’s play”; is serious business. From sociologists to psychologists and from anthropologists to social critics, writers have produced mountains of books about the meaning and importance of play. But what do we know about...
Dear Parent: Caring for Infants with Respect
Distilled from Magda Gerber’s years of writing and lecturing, this book is a helpful and reassuring resource for parents of new babies and growing infants. It also includes chapters on applying Educaring® principles in group care settings. Short chapters make it easy to read and find information about life with...
Escape From Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children
This is a reprint of John Holt's controversial book about the rights of children and how adults and children can live and learn together more enjoyably and transparently by rethinking their relationships. Under the guise of care and protection, children are kept in the walled garden of childhood, outside the...
Growing Without Schooling Volume 1 (GWS: The Complete Collection)
John Holt (1983–1985) is the author of How Children Learn and How Children Fail, which together have sold over a million and a half copies, and eight other books about children and learning. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages. Once a leading figure in school reform,...
Growing Without Schooling Volume 2
Volume 2 shows homeschooling gaining ground in the public's eye, and these articles reflect the grassroots nature of the movement. Stories about children learning over time; household chores and allowances; computers and television use; how to teach math, reading, and other subjects with patience and clarity, and more fill these...
