Children's Games in Street and Playground by Iona Opie

Children's Games in Street and Playground by Iona Opie

This record of children's outdoor games played in the street, park, playground, or wasteland is drawn from the contributions of 10,000 children in England, Scotland and Wales. It reveals that the games children take pleasure in when out on their own are usually those learnt from each other - not from adults. They are games in which children may deliberately scare each other, ritually hurt each other, take foolish risks, play ten against one, and yet in which they consistenly observe their own sense of fair play. This volume explains in detail how a large number of street games are played, and gives the rhymes and sayings children repeat while playing them, together with their different regional names. It also contains notes on their individual histories, and compares apparently recently invented games with amusements in Elizabethan, medieval and even classical times, while numerous analogues from other countries indicate the extent of their distribution. Iona and Peter Opie have also written "The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes", "The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book", "The Oxford Book of Children's Verse", "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren", "Classic Fairy Tales", "A Nursery Companion" and "The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse". Iona Opie is also the author of "The Singing Game" and "People in the Playground".

Iona Opie has dedicated her life to collecting and preserving children's rhymes as an art form. I suppose my message in life is 'Nursery rhymes are good for you.' And the sooner you start, the better. I always have one myself every morning. I just open a nursery rhyme book at random. This morning I read:
Taffy was born on a
moonshiney night.

His head in a pipskin,
his heels upright.

You see, if you acquire a nursery rhyme-ical attitude, you're not at all put out by life's little bumps and bruises--they just seem funny and entirely normal.

Rosemary Wells says, We live in a time when our language is shrinking. Mother Goose, which represents our language at its most innocent, playful, and profound, is in danger of disappearing completely. Rhymes that have been repeated and refined for forty generations are no longer being taught to children. It is a great honor to work with Iona Opie with the hope of preserving these rhymes for many generations more. Rosemary wells lives in New York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780192814890
ISBN 10	0192814893
Title	Children's Games in Street and Playground
Author	Iona Opie
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	1984-10-01
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable