Landscapes of Childhood – serie

From the ages of five to twelve, the middle years of childhood, young people explore their surroundings and find or construct private spaces. In these secret places, children develop and control environments of their own and enjoy freedom from the rules of the adult world. Children's Special Places enters these hidden worlds, reveals their importance to children's development and emotional health, and shows educators, parents, and other adults how they can foster a bond between young people and nature that is important to maturation.

Today's children are occupied with activities taking place in settings that are isolated from nature or are simulations of the earth's natural environment. As a result, unless they receive appropriate nature education, many children may never develop a familiarity with and positive attitudes toward the natural world that are so crucial to its preservation. Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism examines the ways in which literature, media, and other cultural forms for young people address nature, place, and ecology. Studies in children's culture and ecocriticism have been largely separate enterprises; Wild Things is the first book to conjoin the two fields. The book provides scholars and teachers with in-depth discussion of particular texts as well as larger historical patterns and theoretical paradigms. Essays focus on classic literary works such as Chariotte's Web and The Lorax as well as series fiction, nature magazines, environmental music and videos, the Muppets and other Jim Henson productions, and Disney's latest theme park, Animal Kingdom. Affording the reader a return to the wild places of childhood - both real and imagined - Wild Things is a first-class explorat

This distinctive volume contains twenty first-person narrative essays from Holocaust survivors who were children at the time of the atrocity. As children aged two to sixteen, these authors had different experiences than their adult counterparts and also had different outlooks in understanding the events that they survived. While most Holocaust memoirs focus on one individual or one country, ""And Life Is Changed Forever"" offers a varied collection of compelling reflections. The survivors come from Germany, Poland, Austria, Romania, Hungary, Italy, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia. All of the contributors escaped death, but they did so in myriad ways. Some children posed as Gentiles or were hidden by sympathizers, some went to concentration camps and survived slave labor, some escaped on the Kindertransports, and some were sent to endure hardships in a ""safe"" location such as Siberia or unoccupied France. While each essay is intensely personal, all speak to the universal horrors and the triumphs of all children who have survived persecution. ""And Life Is Changed Forever"" also focuses on what these children became - teachers, engineers, physicians, entrepreneurs, librarians, parents, and grandparents - and explores the impact of the Holocaust on their later lives.

British author Philip Pullman's celebrated trilogy for young readers, His Dark Materials [Northern Lights/Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), The Amber Spyglass (2000)], has reached a broad spectrum of readers, from those appreciating his metaphysical imagination and literary depth to those charmed by his suspenseful and emotional storytelling. Pullman's trilogy is distinguished not only for its narrative and poetic power but also for its awareness of literary tradition. His Dark Materials confronts some of the most urgent dilemmas of our time without suggesting answers but rather a way of meeting them with courage and surviving them with grace. Edited by Millicent Lenzrenowned for her study of Pullman's workthis is the first book to place His Dark Materials in critical perspective. The fourteen diverse essays within offer literary and historical analysis as well as approaches from such disciplines as theology, storytelling, and linguistics 1886167249 03e040305-56

Published in 1989 to wide acclaim, Come the Morning was one of the first novels for older children to treat the problem of homelessness realistically. Fifteen years later, with unemployment and poverty on the rise again and homeless families haunting the streets of all our major cities, the book remains as sobering and timely as it was in the late 1980s. Stark and sparsely written, this novel is a moving account of a young man forced to measure memory and love against reason and reality. It is at once an illuminating look at the surreal lives of America's homeless and a tribute to the strength of faith and family. The new edition of this prize-winning novel is enriched with twenty striking photographs by Marissa Roth and a new afterword and commentary by the author.

The widowed Jessie Woolman, now in her seventies, her two married daughters, Ellen and Martha, and two grand-children live in Ann Arbor, where the family owns a museum that harbors a meandering stream and historical artifacts of the region bounded by the rivers, Just as Jessie's aging mind begins to wander, Ellen's husband dies in a car accident and the Woolman family begins a new journey led by two very different men Harvey Mack, a developer with an eye on the Woolman property and the grieving Ellen, and Sam Theopolis, a mystic hired to care for Jessie. Sam becomes both Harvey's rival and a healing presence for the family until a crisis descends and he, too, needs the protection of the Woolmans' innocent belief in the saving power of love. Combining sorrow and grief with considerable light-hearted wit and eccentric characters. Sister Water is a novel that will reach old and young readers alike. Through her lyrical prose, author Nancy Willard draws on the rich style of magical realism to create a narrative flow that is at once powerful and seductive. Important to the Landscapes of Childhood series, this novel raises significant questions about the state of childhood and how that state affects adult sensibilities.

While the study of children's poetry has always had a place in the realm of children's literature, scholars have not typically considered it in relation to the larger scope of contemporary poetry. In this volume, Joseph T. Thomas, Jr., explores the ""playground"" of children's poetry within the world of contemporary adult poetic discourse, bringing the complex social relations of play and games, cliques and fashions, and drama and humor in children's poetry to light for the first time. ""Poetry's Playground"" considers children's poetry published in the United States from the mid-twentieth century onward, a time when many established adult poets began writing for young audiences. Through the work of major figures like Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, Shel Silverstein, and Jack Prelutsky, Thomas explores children's poems within the critical and historical conversations surrounding adult texts, arguing at the same time that children's poetry is an oft-neglected but crucial part of the American poetic tradition. Canonical issues are central to ""Poetry's Playground."" The volume begins by tracing Robert Frost's emergence as the United States' official school poet, exploring the political and aesthetic dimensions of his canonization and considering which other poets his canonization pushed aside. The study also includes a look at eight major anthologies of children's poems in the United States, suggesting a descriptive canon that will be invaluable to future scholarship. Additionally, ""Poetry's Playground"" addresses poetry actually written and performed by children, exploring the connections between folk poetry produced both on playgrounds and in the classroom. ""Poetry's Playground"" is a groundbreaking study that makes bold connections between children's and adult poetry. This book will be of interest to poets, scholars of poetry and children's literature, as well as students and teachers of literary history, cultural anthropology, and contemporary poetry.

The Child in the World builds a bridge between continental philosophers, who tend to overlook child existence, and developmental psychologists, who often fail to consider the philosophical assumptions underlying their work. In this volume, author Eva M. Simms draws on both psychological and phenomenological research to investigate child existence in its cultural and historical context and explore the ways children interact with the world around them.Simms examines key experiences of childhood with special attention to the non-dualistic nature of the child’s consciousness and the understanding that there is more to the child’s experiences than cognitive processes. In chapters that proceed from infancy to early childhood, Simms considers how children live their embodiment, coexist with others, experience and the spaces and places of their neighborhoods, have deeply felt relations to things, grasp time intuitively and often in contradiction to adult clock-time, and are transformed by the mystery of the symbolic order of play and language.Simms’s approach is particularly informed by the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which allows for a descriptive and grounded understanding of child experience as well as sophisticated and critical philosophical thinking about human existence in general.By respecting and celebrating the magical non-dualistic relationship child consciousness has to the world, The Child in the World offers readers a unique opportunity to expand their understanding of human existence. Students and teachers of psychology and philosophy, early childhood educators, psychotherapists, as well as general readers who are parents of young children will enjoy this fascinating volume.