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.

Jerry, Nancy, and Gail seek answers for the mysterious injuries occurring on Dr. Fell's new neighborhood playground that seem to heal as if by magic.

An account of the games which children between the ages of six and twelve invent or perform out-of-doors for their own enjoyment

First published in 1959, Iona and Peter Opie's The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature. Going outside the nursery, with its assortment of parent-approved entertainments, to observe and investigate the day-to-day creative intelligence and activities of children, the Opies bring to life the rites and rhymes, jokes and jeers, laws, games, and secret spells of what has been called "the greatest of savage tribes, and the only one which shows no signs of dying out."

The result of the author's field studies over two years in a school playground, this book records conversations and events, illustrating the games and jokes beloved by children.

Do you look back on your school days, and remember magical times, powerful and enduring friendships, and secret adventures? Well, snap out of it. You're deluding yourself. Based on the popular website playgroundlaw.com The Law of the Playground is a dictionary of the insults, games, torture, legendary anecdotes and pure creative insanity that we all - as pre-moral children -inflicted on each other. Whilst the emphasis is always on humor, the book acknowledges that children can be bastards, and begrudgingly accepts that it's, actually, very amusing. Written with dark nostalgia, and more wit and substance than average, everyone can find something they will identify with in The Law of the Playground. A timely antidote to the rose-tinted view of childhood offered by FriendsReunited.co.uk and SchoolDisco.com.

In his final work, a visionary game designer reveals how a surprising range of play-based experiences can unlock our imagination and help us capture the power of fun and delight. Bernard De Koven (1941–2018) was a pioneering designer of games and theorist of fun. He studied games long before the field of game studies existed. For De Koven, games could not be reduced to artifacts and rules; they were about a sense of transcendent fun. This book, his last, is about the imagination: the imagination as a playground, a possibility space, and a gateway to wonder. The Infinite Playground extends a play-centered invitation to experience the power and delight unlocked by imagination. It offers a curriculum for playful learning. De Koven guides the readers through a series of observations and techniques, interspersed with games. He begins with the fundamentals of play, and proceeds through the private imagination, the shared imagination, and imagining the world—observing, “the things we imagine can become the world.” Along the way, he reminisces about playing ping-pong with basketball great Bill Russell; begins the instructions for a game called Reception Line with “Mill around”; and introduces blathering games—Blather, Group Blather, Singing Blather, and The Blather Chorale—that allow the player's consciousness to meander freely. Delivered during the last months of his life, The Infinite Playground has been painstakingly cowritten with Holly Gramazio, who worked together with coeditors Celia Pearce and Eric Zimmerman to complete the project as Bernie De Koven's illness made it impossible for him to continue writing. Other prominent game scholars and designers influenced by De Koven, including Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, and members of Bernie's own family, contribute short interstitial essays.

Meet the second book of The Able Fables®, a heartwarming story of a young lion who adores gymnastics. When Lia struggles to master a new skill on the balance beam, she doubts her abilities and ponders quitting the sport altogether. Encouraged by her teammates, Lia harnesses the power of a kind mind and learns to embrace the balance beam as she does her birthmark.

Drawing on ethnographic accounts of children's media-referenced play, this book explores children's engagement with media cultures and playground experiences, analyzing a range of issues such as learning, fantasy, communication and identity.

The aim of this book is to offer an informed account of changes in the nature of the relationship between play, media and commercial culture in England through an analysis of play in the 1950s/60s and the present day.