At the heart of this volume is the recognition that children’s engagement with play and story are intrinsically and intricately linked. The contributing authors share a passionate interest in the development and well-being of children, in particular through their use of imagination and adaptation of the everyday into play and stories. Following these principles, the volume explores the connections between play, story, and pretense with regard to many cultural and contextual factors that influence the way these elements vary in children’s lives. In a departure from earlier collections on play and story, the authors take a particular focus on normative as compared with atypical development. This collection begins with an approach to understanding the developmental relationship between play and story, which recognizes their similarities while acknowledging their differences. Much of the collection addresses pretend play and story in children with autism spectrum disorder, an understudied but important group for consideration, as these dimensions of their lives and development have often been considered problematic. The volume also includes sections on play and story in classroom settings and play and story across cultures, including non-English-speaking environments such as Israel, Romania, China, and Mexico. It concludes with a discussion of how play differs across sociocultural and economic contexts, making a unifying claim for the importance of play in children’s lives but also calling for an understanding of what play means to very different groups of children.

Product Description: Debate regarding the ability of children with autism to acquire verbs is both limited and inconclusive. This book explores this understudied area of language development in autism to answer the question: How do children with autism learn the meaning of verbs? The approach presents a critical survey of qualitative and quantitative research on verb acquisition in autism, assessing the theories of language acquisition in typical development, including available empirical research...read more

Thoroughly updated to incorporate the latest features and capabilities of PostgreSQL 8.0, a comprehensive overview of the powerful open-source database program utilizes a code-based approach to implementing, customizing, and optimizing diverse database applications, covering such areas as data retrieval and storage, client/server issues, queries, and various programming tools. Original. (Intermediate)

Provides more than sixty timesaving tips to get the most out of the Linux operating systems, covering such topics as GNOME, Samba, downloading and uploading, task scheduler, kernal modules, encryption, and networking.

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