For over a century, summer camps have provided many American children's first experience of community beyond their immediate family and neighborhoods.... Each summer, children experience the pain of homesickness, learn to swim, and sit around campfires at night. Children's Nature chronicles the history of the American summer camp, from its invention in the late nineteenth century through its rise in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Leslie Paris investigates how camps came to matter so greatly to so many Americans, while providing a window onto the experiences of the children who attended them and the aspirations of the adults who created them. Summer camps helped cement the notion of childhood as a time apart, at once protected and playful. Camp leaders promised that campers would be physically and morally invigorated by fresh mountain air, simple food, daily swimming, and group living, and thus better fit for the year to come. But camps were important as well because children delighted in them, helped to shape them, and felt transformed by them. Focusing primarily on the northeast, where camps were first founded and the industry grew most extensively, and drawing on a range of sources including camp films, amateur performances, brochures, oral histories, letters home, industry journals, camp newspapers, and scrapbooks, Children's Nature brings this special and emotionally resonant world to life.

Provides an authoritative resource that educators and health care providers can use every day to meet the social, emotional, academic, family, and... health needs of children. Each of 81 chapters is completely new or revised and addresses developmental issues, reviews related problems and implications, offers evidence-based strategies for prevention and intervention, and recommends additional resources Organized into four sections-(I) Children's Social and Emotional Needs, (II) Children's Academic Needs, (III) Children's Family-Related Needs, and (IV) Children's Health-Related Needs.

This study integrates social science research, social policy, and legal analysis related to children and the law. It provides the most cutting-edge... information available on topics such as child abuse, children's eyewitness testimony, divorce and custody, juvenile crime, and children's rights. The volume is an important resource for researchers, attorneys, judges, policy makers, legislators, and mental health, social service, and police professionals.

Problem-solving skills evolve through experience and dynamic interaction with a problem. But equally important--as the Russian psychologist L. S.... Vygotsky proposed--is social interaction. Successful problem-solving is a social process. Sharing problem-solving tasks--with skilled adults and with other children--is vital to a child's growth in expertise and confidence. In problem-solving, confidence can be more important than skill. In a real sense, problem-solving lies at the heart of what we mean by intelligence. The ability to identify a goal, to work out how to achieve it, and to carry out that plan is the essence of every intelligent activity. Could it be, Thornton suggests, that problem-solving processes provide the fundamental machinery for cognitive development? In Children Solving Problems she synthesizes the dramatic insights and findings of post-Piagetian research and sets the agenda for the next stage in understanding the varied phenomena of children's problem-solving.

Children's picturebooks are the very first books we encounter, and they form an important, constantly evolving, and dynamic sector of the publishing... world. But what does it take to create a successful picture book for children? In this publication, Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles introduce us to the world of children's picturebooks, providing a solid background to the industry while exploring the key concepts and practices that have gone into the creation of successful picturebooks.

Children's Places examines the ways in which children and adults, from their different vantage-points in society, negotiate the 'proper place' of... children in both social and spatial terms. It looks at some of the recognised constructions of children, including perspectives from cultures that do not distinguish children as a distinct category of people, as well as examining contexts for them, from schools and kindergartens to inner cities and war-zones. The result is a much-needed insight into the notions of inclusion and exclusion, the placement and displacement of children within generational ranks and orders, and the kinds of places that children construct for themselves. Based on in-depth ethnographic research from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, Australia and New Zealand.

Children's Play looks at the many facets of play and how it develops from infancy through late childhood. Authors W. George Scarlett, Sophie Naudeau,... Dorothy Salonius-Pasternak, and Iris Ponte take a broad approach to examining how children play by including a wide variety of types of play, play settings, and play media. The book also discusses major revolutions in the way today’s children play, including changes in organized youth sports, children’s humor, and electronic play. Children's Play addresses diversity throughout the text and explores play on the topics of gender, disabilities, socioeconomic class, and culture.  

When Derek Kirk Kim (The Eternal Smile) published his debut graphic novel back in 2003, it made an immediate stir. The story about a group of young... people navigating adulthood and personal relationships is told with such sympathy and perception that the book was immediately hailed as an important new work. Seven years later, it’s clear that Same Difference has won a place among the great literature of the last decade. It stands not only with Fun Home, Persepolis, and American Born Chinese as a lasting graphic novel, but with much of the best fiction of this young century. Derek’s distinctive voice as an author, coupled with his clear, crisp, expressive art has made this story a classic. And this classic is now back in print, in a deluxe edition from First Second.

In "Children's Play", leading experts in play research, child development, and early childhood education examine recent policy decisions and demonstrate... the importance of play in helping children learn basic literacy skills, social awareness, and creative problem solving. Readers will also find a comprehensive summary of the developmental benefits of play, examples of how research has been applied in practice, a multicultural perspective on play, and ideas for how to play imaginative games with children.

This classic reference for administrators, educators, and counselors demystifies the specialized information embodied in the results of children's... psychological tests. Explaining key principles and terminology, the author addresses the validity and authenticity of numerous widely used measures of emotional and mental development, intelligence, aptitude, and academic achievement. Instruments used for identifying children for services under IDEA are given special attention, as are those that provide data useful for developing IEPs. Updated to include revised and recently introduced tests, this critically acclaimed manual is a valuable addition to every nonpsychologist's library.

Originating in a recent CIERA conference held at the University of Michigan, this book brings together the nation's most distinguished researchers to... examine how readers understand text and how comprehension is assessed. The first part provides both national and historical contexts for the study of reading comprehension. The second part examines how vocabulary, motivation, and expertise influence comprehension, and it includes analyses of the developmental course and correlates of comprehension. Chapters in the third part consider how schools focus on comprehension for instruction and assessment. The fourth part includes chapters on large-scale assessment that analyze how test formats and psychometric characteristics influence measures of reading comprehension. At the end of each part is a commentary--written by an expert--that reviews the chapters, critiques the main points, and synthesizes critical issues.Key features of this outstanding new book include:*Integration of Research and Practice--provides a bridge between conceptual issues studied by researchers concerned with reading comprehension theories and practical issues addressed by educators concerned with classroom instruction and assessment. *Comprehension Focus--provides a thorough history and rigorous research-based analyses of reading comprehension.*Assessment Focus--provides innovative approaches to comprehension assessment that include the influences of vocabulary, decoding, and motivation.*Synthetic Commentaries--provides periodic summaries that analyze and synthesize research, practices, and issues discussed in each part.*Expertise--contributing authors and commentators are highly respected authorities on reading comprehension (see table of contents).This text is appropriate for educational and psychological researchers, reading educators, and graduate students in education and psychology. It is part of the CIERA series, which includes the following volumes:Taylor and Pearson: Teaching Reading: Effective Schools, Accomplished Teachers (2002) Van Kleeck, Stahl, and Bauer: On Reading Books to Children: Parents and Teachers (2003) Hoffman and Schallert: The Texts in Elementary Classrooms (2005)

The authors of this volume provide discussion on vital issues related to the rights of children in the United States, including: the historical and... contextual perspective on the rights of children; the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child; the differing views on children's rights and competencies; and the rights of children within the family, the social service system, the health care system, the educational system, the juvenile justice system and in employment.

A comprehensive book supported by extensive research studies and data, Bjorklund's text presents the broadest coverage of topics in cognitive... development. Unlike other books, Bjorklund shows readers how developmental function can help explain individual differences in cognition by covering both the typical pattern of change in thinking observed over time and the individual differences in children's thinking in infancy and childhood. A major theme of this book is the continuous transaction between the embodied child embedded in a social world: although a child is born prepared to make some sense of the world, his or her mind is also shaped by forces in the physical and social environment.

This book offers a unified account of the major research findings and theories on the development of children's thinking from infancy to adolescence;... and also considers their practical implications. It examines the change processes through which development occurs, as well as the nature of the changes in language, perception, memory, conceptual understanding, and problem-solving that mark cognitive development. Eight central themes presented in the first chapter integrate and unify the presentation. The authors examine Piaget's theory of development, information-processing theories of development, sociocultural theories, perceptual development, language development, memory development, conceptual development, problem solving, social cognition and the development of academic skills. For anyone involved in the thinking processes and development of children.