Designs For Living And Learning Second Edition

You likely have dreams for your early childhood environment that are greater than rating scales, regulations, and room arrangements. Designs for Living and Learning has been a favorite resource among educators and caregivers for more than a decade, and this new edition is packed with even more ideas that can be used as you create captivating environments that nurture children, families, and staff while supporting children's learning. With hundreds of all-new colorful photographs of real early learning settings and a multitude of simple and practical concepts for creative indoor and outdoor spaces and learning materials, this book truly is a source of inspiration as you learn how to shape welcoming spaces where children can learn and grow. Expanded chapters include new information reflecting current trends and concerns in early childhood, such as the use of repurposed and nontraditional materials, children in the outdoors, alternative ways to think about providing for learning outcomes, facing and overcoming barriers and negotiating change, and the impact of environmental rating scales in Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS). Two new chapters are included, one highlighting the transformations of environments with before and after photos and outlines of the process, and the other with examples of soliciting children's ideas about the environment. Deb Curtis and Margie Carter are internationally acclaimed experts in early childhood. They host three-day institutes and professional development seminars for early childhood professionals; consult with early childhood programs across North America, Australia, and New Zealand; and have written many books together.

The best-selling source of inspiration for early childhood professionals designing learning environments; updated with all new photographs and fresh content

Provides early childhood teachers a framework for collaborating with children to create a dynamic, emergent curriculum.

Give children wondrous places to learn and grow! Drawing inspiration from a variety of approaches--from Waldorf to Montessori to Reggio to Greenman, Prescott, and Olds--the authors outline hundreds of ways to create healthy and inviting physical, social, and emotional environments for children in child care. Full-color photographs of actual early childhood programs demonstrate that the spaces children learn and grow in can be comfortable for children, teachers, and parents alike. Margie Carter serves on the adjunct faculty at Pacific Oaks College Northwest, Seattle, Washington. Deb Curtis works as a child care teacher at the Burlington Little School in Seattle. Their other books include The Art of Awareness, The Visionary Director, Training Teachers, Spreading the News, and Reflecting Children's Lives.

"Children deserve to spend their days in well-designed environments that support their needs and stimulate their learning. Adults who spend their days teaching and caring for young children deserve environments that maximize their skills. Caring Spaces, Learning Places is a book of ideas, observations, problems, solutions, examples, resources, photographs, and poetry. Here you will find best of current thinking about children's environments - 360 pages to challenge you, stimulate you, inspire you." - product description.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Create a warm and inviting place where children feel at home. Discover the many ways your home can provide comfortable places where children love to learn and love to be. Filled with no- and low-cost ideas, this book demonstrates many unique and practical possibilities for your home's indoor and outdoor spaces. Chapters are packed with colorful photographs and provide examples and tips for designing learning zones, selecting items, organizing materials, and more. Checklists, resources, and questions are included to help you evaluate your setting, implement changes, and create a place that feels like a second home to the children in your care.

In this revolutionary book, a renowned computer scientist explains the importance of teaching children the basics of computing and how it can prepare them to succeed in the ever-evolving tech world. Computers have completely changed the way we teach children. We have Mindstorms to thank for that. In this book, pioneering computer scientist Seymour Papert uses the invention of LOGO, the first child-friendly programming language, to make the case for the value of teaching children with computers. Papert argues that children are more than capable of mastering computers, and that teaching computational processes like de-bugging in the classroom can change the way we learn everything else. He also shows that schools saturated with technology can actually improve socialization and interaction among students and between students and teachers. Technology changes every day, but the basic ways that computers can help us learn remain. For thousands of teachers and parents who have sought creative ways to help children learn with computers, Mindstorms is their bible.

Formerly a publication of The Brain Store This book is packed with easy-to-use strategies and cutting-edge research to help you use ergonomics, lighting, temperature, color, and other factors to boost learning and student success.