Explore what it means to share space and have fun on the playground with this sweetly funny picture book of playground rules based in social-emotional learning. There are so many reasons why our playground RULES! 1. Everyone gets a turn, no matter how long it takes... 2. We play fair (even when the weather isn't). 3. We try to be patient, which is always worth it! This young picture book plays with the double meaning of "rules" to explore how following a few simple rules of kindness can make playtime more fun for everyone! Featuring simple text and engaging illustrations that embrace the varying needs and capabilities of the adorable cast of animal characters, Our Playground Rules! is the perfect tool to help small children feel seen and better empathsize with others.
An accessible guide to understanding what qualifies as sexual harassment and how to combat it, using the simple rules children learn on the playground. One of today’s most hotly discussed topics is sexual harassment in the workplace: what it looks like, how to prevent it, and what to do about it. So many people don’t realize that they have been victims of sexual harassment or that they have a right to speak up and demand different treatment. Many don’t realize that they are committing it, thanks certain behaviors being dismissed, forgiven, or ignored for many years when they should have been corrected long ago. In the heat of today’s #MeToo movement, Brigitte Gawenda Kimichik, JD, and J.R Tomlinson take things back to basics by applying the rules we all learned on the playground to the modern-day workplace, thus making clear to everyone what is and what isn’t OK. Play Nice: Playground Rules for Respect in the Workplace is an indispensable resource—both for empowering those who wish to reassert their boundaries and for teaching allies how to help in this fight. Praise for Play Nice “Chock full of smart, strategic advice to help anyone suffering from toxic behavior in the workplace. When you finish this book, you will realize that equal rights for women is not some far-off ideal but a reality that that soon can be achieved.” —Skip Hollandsworth, Executive Editor, Texas Monthly “For real change to occur, it is imperative that we all start holding ourselves responsible for ensuring everyone is treated respectfully. Play Nice is a giant step in the right direction. This book should be mandatory reading for all organizations and parents.” —Vanessa Fox Corp. VP, Chief Development Officer, Jack in the Box “This is a must-read for any human resources executive, any woman embarking on her professional career, and any bystander (male or female) who is not sure what to do when faced with bad behavior.” —Joel L. Ross, former General Counsel of Trammell Crow Company and retired partner of Vinson & Elkins LLP
Penguin's rambunctious animal friends can't seem to behave at the playground. They throw sand - and run so fast they knock each other down! By the end of the day, however, the friends have learned what's safe in playground play. "Required reading for parents and children alike." - Kirkus Reviews
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.
“Mine” is one of the first words babies learn, and by the time we grow up, the idea of ownership seems natural, whether we are buying a cup of coffee or a house. But who controls the space behind your airplane seat: you, reclining, or the squished laptop user behind you? Why is plagiarism wrong, but it’s okay to knock off a recipe or a dress design? And after a snowstorm, why does a chair in the street hold your parking space in Chicago, while in New York you lose both the space and the chair? In Mine!, Michael Heller and James Salzman, two of the world’s leading authorities on ownership, explain these puzzles and many more. Remarkably, they reveal, there are just six simple rules that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the rule that steers us to do what they want. But we can pick differently. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality. Mine! draws on mind-bending, often infuriating, and always fascinating accounts from business, history, courtrooms, and everyday life to reveal how the rules of ownership control our lives and shape our world.
How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds -- forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games. Play Anything, reveals that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations. Soccer wouldn't be soccer if it wasn't composed of two teams of eleven players using only their feet, heads, and torsos to get a ball into a goal; Tetris wouldn't be Tetris without falling pieces in characteristic shapes. Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult. Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it's the hard things in life that give it meaning. Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances- like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints-as sources for meaning and joy. We can "play anything" by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears. Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, ancient poetry to modern consumerism, Bogost shows us how today's chaotic world can only be tamed-and enjoyed-when we first impose boundaries on ourselves.
Cassandra LOVES school so much she never, ever wants to leave! Cassandra does not want to go home from school. She stays after the nice teacher leaves. She stays while the janitor with a tattoo mops the floors. She stays after the slightly scary principal turns off all the lights and goes home. She plays with the clay and reads until after dark, when her mom and dad realize she is missing and come in a panic to take her home. The next day, Cassandra gets up, eats breakfast, gets on her bike and heads off to school -- but it is Saturday and all the doors and windows are locked. So on her way back home she stops by the store and places an order. The next day she looks out the window to find her purchase has been delivered -- there is a brand-new red-brick school with a nice teacher, a slightly scary principal, and a janitor with tattoos in her very own backyard, so she can have school any time she likes! This story was written for Cassandra, a girl from Pickering, Ontario who said that the most interesting thing about her was that she LOVED school!
