Responding to current debates on the place of play in schools, the authors have extensively revised their groundbreaking book. They explain how and why play is a critical part of children’s development, as well as the central role adults have to promote it. This classic textbook and popular practitioner resource offers systematic descriptions and analyses of the different roles a teacher adopts to support play, including those of stage manager, mediator, player, scribe, assessor, communicator, and planner. This new edition has been expanded to include significant developments in the broadening landscape of early learning and care, such as assessment, diversity and culture, intentional teaching, inquiry, and the construction of knowledge. New for the Second Edition of The Play’s the Thing! Additional theories on the relationship of teachers and children’s play, e.g., Vygotsky and the role of imaginary play and Reggio Emilia’s image of the competent child.Current issues from media content, consumer culture, and environmental concerns.Standards and testing in preschool and kindergarten.Bridging the cultural gap between home and school.Using digital technology to make children’s play visible.Recent brain development research.And much more! Elizabeth Jones is faculty emerita in human development at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, California. Gretchen Reynolds is on the faculty in the early childhood education program at Algonquin College in Ottawa, Canada. Their other books on play include Master Players (Reynolds & Jones) and Playing to Get Smart (Jones & Cooper). “The Play’s the Thing provides an excellent summary of theories related to the importance of children's play and illustrates the six roles teachers can use to put these theories into practice.” —Harvard Educational Review “This book describes the knowledge that is required to foster play and to use it as a solid foundation on which to build learning.” —From the Foreword to the First Edition by Elizabeth Prescott, Faculty Emerita, Pacific Oaks College “Playful learning offers educators a plan for creating fun and engaging pedagogies that support rich curricula. . . . And this book offers magnificent descriptions and evidence-based examples of how teachers can pave this new road and create a climate for learning via play.” —From the Foreword to the Second Edition by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, University of Delaware

P.G. Wodehouse's adaptation of Jatek a Kastelyban (The Play in the Castle) brings Ferenc Molnar's classic comedy to a wider audience. The play is a romantic farce without the usual door-slamming and comic entrances and exits. Instead, we are treated to a party of guests seemingly overhearing a lover's tryst, only to find (with the help of a very quick-witted playwright) that they are actually hearing something very different. The play combines beautifully formed characters with an exquisite text.

The traditional role for teachers in children's play was to structure it, setting rules and interrupting if things got "out of hand". However, for children three to five, sociodramatic play is a way to invent and make familiar the rhythms and actions of everyday life. This text describes why play is a fundamentally important part of children's development and shows how adults can support and promote play. The authors offer systematic descriptions and analyses of the different roles a teacher adopts toward this end, including those of stage manager, mediator, player, scribe, assessor, communicator, and planner, and describe both highly interactive and inhibited children from different economic backgrounds. The authors integrate cognitive and psycho-dynamic theory as well, regarding the scripts children play in both cognitive and affective terms, and they discuss the importance of fantasy and reality play themes, demonstrating the implications of play for literacy learning.

An insider’s spirited history of Yale Repertory Theatre In this serious and entertaining chronicle of the first fifty years of Yale Repertory Theatre, award-winning dramaturg James Magruder shows how dozens of theater artists have played their parts in the evolution of a sterling American institution. Each of its four chapters is dedicated to one of the Yale Rep’s artistic directors to date: Robert Brustein, Lloyd Richards, Stan Wojewodski Jr., and James Bundy. Numerous sidebars—dedicated to the spaces used by the theater, the playwrights produced most often, casting, the prop shop, the costume shop, artist housing, and other topics—enliven the lavishly illustrated four-color text. This fascinating insider account, full of indelible descriptions of crucial moments in the Rep’s history, is based in part on interviews with some of America’s most respected actors about their experiences at the Rep, including Paul Giamatti, James Earl Jones, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Courtney B. Vance, Dianne Wiest, and Henry Winkler—among many others. More than just a valentine to an important American theater, The Play’s the Thing is a story about institution-building and the force of personality; about the tug-of-war between vision and realpolitik; and about the continuous negotiation between educational needs and artistic demands.

Marina Jenkyns conveys the excitement of working therapeutically with dramatic text though a personal and highly readable analysis of plays from a variety of periods and cultures. Influenced by the theories of Winnicott and Klein she lays bare the dynamics of relationships and plots to show how they can be used to help us understand our own relationships to each other and the world around us. This highly innovative text integrates therapeutic practice and literature in an engaging and challenging book which will hold the attention of a wide audience. This book contains new ideas for dramatherapy practice, theatre directors and teachers.

This text features selections from fourteen modern international plays, excerpted for intermediate-level ESL students.

This text features selections from fourteen modern international plays, excerpted for intermediate-level ESL students.

Because unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching us the skills we need as adults – the skills of cooperation, making and enforcing rules, compromise, negotiating conflicts, accepting defeat, children have been dependent on others to regulate them. More and more they have become “other directed.” It is no surprise then that during the days of self-quarantine, when schools, playgrounds and other recreational activities were shut down, children were subject to the emotional stresses of having to find their own way. Their self-direction having had little chance of development failed them when they needed it most. This is a book for teachers and parents as well who seek to develop such self-directed, “can-do” children.

The Play's the Thing: The Theatrical Collaboration of Clark Bowlen and Kathleen Keena, 1988-2012 Kathleen Keena iUniverse, 187 pages, (paperback) $17.95, 978-1-4917-6151-9 (Reviewed: June 2015) The Play's the Thing is Kathleen Keena's theater diary starting at Manchester Community College in Connecticut, 1988, where she meets theater chair Clark Bowlen. They collaborate (and eventually marry) until Bowlen's death at age 70. We follow their productions from academia to community to independent theater, as Keena directs while Bowlen designs sets and lighting. Keenas narrative takes a close look at individual plays. Including such productions as The Glass Menagerie, The Taming of the Shrew, The Rainmaker, Desire Under the Elms, and Buried Child, she breaks her discussion of each into categories: Background, Synopsis, Challenges, Actors. The author is incisive, articulate, and effective as she examines the thought process behind each play. While exploring The Glass Menagerie, she notes: Tennessee Williams' works are infused with fragile Southern belles, crumbling plantations, inarticulate males, sexual ambiguity, and a lyrical quality with a remorseful tone. She goes on to explain her vision of the piece, Bowlen's ideas for the set, any obstacles to the success of the production, and techniques she uses to prepare her cast. Readers arent likely to find a more absorbing, compelling account of theatrical production. Keena and Bowlen always took chances, pushing boundaries and rethinking traditional parameters to facilitate access to the audience, whether it was making the family home of Buried Child transparent or moving The Importance of Being Earnest to America on the verge of The Great Depression. The author shares interesting details about bringing one's interpretation of the script to the stage, while intertwining her professional evolution with her husband's. The Play's the Thing offers pleasurable, dynamic reading for anybody who enjoys understanding how a show is built from the ground up. Also available as an ebook.

The Play"s The Thing: The Plays of William Shakespeare is aimed at a YA (young adult) audience as an introduction to the greatest plays ever written. Direct and personal and decidedly non-academic, each play gets its own essay, giving the reader an overview of the play with an emphasis on the relevance that the play has to the reader"s own life and concerns. As I wrote in the introduction, "The goal of this guide, then, is to turn Shakespeare from somebody you have to read into somebody that you want to read." A young man struggles with his father s unexpected death. A young couple pledges their love to each other despite their families angry disapproval. A young man rebels against his father while at the same time craving his approval. A father and his family roam across what appears to be a post-apocalyptic dystopian landscape. A Roman general kills the sons of his enemy and serves them to her baked in a pie. Two young couples escape into a forest where magic rules and nothing is quite what it seems. A group of young men decide to give up on women and dating in order to devote themselves to their studies, until a group of beautiful young women changes their minds. The latest YA novels? While they certainly sound like they can be, they re not. They re just one way of looking at some of the plays of William Shakespeare (to be precise, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Henry IV Parts I & 2, King Lear, Love s Labour s Lost) that shows that they re not just old-school classic plays they re old-school classic plays that tell stories that are relevant to my life, to your lives, and to the way we all live today. These are stories of love. Of families. Of fathers and sons. Of the rise and fall of kings. Of what it s like to grow old. Of what it s like to love someone so much it hurts. Of treachery and revenge. Of ambition. Of jealousy. Of forgiveness. Of murder. Almost every human experience you can think of is brought to life in these plays. Which is why, for more than 400 years, they have been seen as the central glory of Western literature. And that s also why the plays of William Shakespeare are, on a daily basis, performed on stages around the world. The stories he told, the characters he created, are universal. Audiences in China, in Ghana, in India, in Brazil, in every part of the world, can appreciate and love Shakespeare as much as the British and Americans.