Your Child from Birth to Eight provides a practical guide to the physical, emotional, social and cognitive development of young children, with a focus on fostering the bond between parent and child. While children develop differently in accordance with their genetic inheritance and environment, Pam Linke, renowned social worker and early childhood expert, clearly defines the steps which help parents to know what milestones children can be expected to reach, at different ages and stages and how best to support their learning.



In addition to developmental guidelines, Your Child from Birth to Eight offers ideas about suitable activities and toys for children as they grow. Tips and advice on issues to do with behaviour, emotions, temperament, toilet training, new siblings, sexual development and starting school are conveyed in an accessible and supportive style.



This fully revised and updated edition draws on contemporary research and provides insights into what is happening to children and why they may do what they do. An invaluable resource for all parents and carers, Your Child from Birth to Eight encapsulates the wisdom and experience of other mums and dads, as well as social workers, health professionals, early childhood practitioners and teachers who engage regularly with children from birth to eight.

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What if, Peter Adams asks in this important and original book, as English teachers, instead of always requiring our students to respond discursively to the literary texts that they encounter in our classrooms — by asking them to analyse, compare, describe, evaluate, explain or to defend a set position with a series of arguments — we were to offer them opportunities to sustain and deepen their engagement with those texts, both intellectual and emotional, by writing about them in creative–imaginative ways? What if, in Robert Witkin’s resonant phrase, we were to ask them “to make an artistic response to the artistic work of others”?

The result is evident in the remarkable pieces of writing which form the heart of this book, pieces of writing which not only show young writers working “at the far reach of their capacities” but which represent a deeply thoughtful, sustained and personal exploration of the significance of the work in question.

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Publication Date: 28-08-2013

The Black-bearded Bai is the first of six plays based on Asian folk lore and written specifically for use by junior and middle secondary students.

The plays are:


The Secret Housewife

The Secret Housewife illustrates a common theme in Oriental folklore. The story may be about a tien, or immortal, but it is really about loneliness, growing old and the difficulty of adapting to a changing world. This sad tale works well as a quiet, tragic mystery.

The Black-bearded Bai

A favourite theme in Chinese folklore is the triumph of intelligence over brute force. This idea is often linked with the victory of a poor person over a wealthy one. The story of Aina-kizz and the Black-bearded Bai fulfils both of the above, and is an amusing and satisfying tale. It seems natural to present it as a Brechtian comedy.

Ido and the Devil

This is a traditional story of good versus evil. Rather than turn Ido into an angel it seemed more fun to portray him as a large, innocent, artless adolescent schoolboy. And rather than portray the Devil as a traditional monster, it seemed more entertaining to depict him as a comic character, lacking in confidence but with a cheeky irrepressible nature. This script has turned into a modern-day absurdist morality play.

Ken Arok

Ken Arok is a fascinating, complex character. He is both a treacherous man and also a brave warrior. To some he is a hero, to others a villain. There is some cheerful comic banditry in Act 1, but the piece ends as a riveting physical drama, complete with stage fights and murder.

The Kimono of O Same San

This story is set in old Tokyo during a famous tragedy that took place in 1657. It is a gentle tale about a girl named O Same. It is also a very violent story. These two seemingly opposing qualities of gentleness and violence have always lain together at the heart of Japan’s history. This play, then, is a tragic love story.

Harisarman

There are many folktales in other cultures about being in the right place at the right time. This is a satisfying story imbued with a quiet Indian humour. It seemed appropriate to present it as a short Bollywood musical.

Apart from being enjoyable and relevant plays, they offer an insight into the culture of the country the play comes from.

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Publication Date: 28-08-2013

One of the hardest decisions for a school Drama group to make is simply this: Which play?



The choice must be entertaining. The text must be clear and relevant. The set must be practical. The play must have parts for a specific number of actors, male and female. The show must not go on endlessly all night. And so on.



And, occasionally, it would be nice to get away from the school musical and tackle a classic.



The Unauthorised Classics Series solves some of these problems.



Doctor Mal Gray Louis is a restructuring of Moliere’s Le Medecin Malgre Lui in the style of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte.



There were no scripts in the Commedia. It was improvised theatre. It consisted of a number of stock characters, and each actor would play the one character throughout his or her career. All Commedia performers would carry comic monologues, double act routines, punch lines and bits of comic business in their heads and improvise their use when on stage. Running gags and topical allusions were a staple diet of the Commedia. The stories acted out were all variations on a theme: a rich miser wants to marry his beautiful daughter to a wealthy nobleman. The nobleman is ugly and conceited, and the girl is in love with someone else. Servants are employed to carry messages between all the parties involved. They lose the messages, fall in love with the young lovers themselves and generally cause chaos!



The Commedia was a comic, boisterous and irreverent form of theatre. So is Doctor Mal Gray Louis.

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Publication Date: 18-07-2014

Five plays for getting into Shakespeare by Carla More



What is the backstory to "The Tempest"?

Who is plotting against who in "Julius Caesar"?

Why is Ariel vying against Puck?

How did Feste break a leg?

And - Where IS Sean Connery?



More Catch The Bard offers five funny and informative short plays based on the characters and themes of William Shakespeare’s plays, providing an introduction to Shakespeare for English and Drama students from year 7-10.



Each play is supplemented with questions and in depth extension exercises catering for a variety of learners and styles.







The Calm before the Tempest



The story of The Tempest is like an iceberg; most of it is backstory. When a ship carrying passengers on their way home from a wedding is wrecked not on an iceberg but on an island, Prospero tells Miranda in flashback scenes what actually happened in Milan twelve years ago. 9 characters.



This Rough Magic



Shakespeare’s magical characters meet at the Rough Magic Conference for Fairyland’s Annual Awards. Some supernaturals have personal gripes, whilst the fairies are solely there to check out Puck. After Prospero resigns his post as Chairman and drowns his magic book, Oberon and Titania, still quarrelling, vie for the position. Happily Puck ends the play with his usual epilogue. 15 characters.



The Festival of Fools



When Shakespeare’s funny men get together at the 400th Annual Comedy Festival there’s bound to be silly-ness and big egos. Whilst Launce, Bottom, the Dromio twins and others strut their stuff , those waiting backstage have a lot to say about everyone else’s performance 15 characters.



Caesar’s Salad Days are Over



Two minor characters of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Popilius Lena and Artemidorus are actually agents of The SUPER TASKFORCE of the ROMAN EMPIRE’s SECRET SERVICE or STRESS. They hire an actor Antonius Maximillius to play a Soothsayer and therefore warn Caesar of the imminent plot. 3 characters.



Sound & Fury



Drama teacher Victor, after watching a ‘Japanese version’ of the Scottish Play, has rewritten it as a Musical. His colleagues are less than enthusiastic, especially when they hear that the ex-barrel girl from The Price is Right will be appearing as Lady Macbeth. The usual school play disasters occur. Fiction and reality blend as the production descends into a tartan chaos signifying nothing. 26 characters.

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Publication Date: 18-07-2014

In the Kingdom of Contradiction - it is raining, yet the sky is blue with sun.



Contrary to a Chinese edict against western influence in music, a courageous woman secretly teaches her young son to play the piano in the home. In setting him on the path to fame as a leading pianist, neither she nor her son expected they would become embroiled in a dangerous confrontation between Shanghai and Canberra. From the birth of China’s Cultural Revolution to the eve of the Tiananmen Square protests, Justin Fleming’s dazzling new play weighs the price of defiance in the face of brutality. His Mother’s Voice is a love story: the love between two young people from different worlds; the love that drives a mother to great sacrifice; and the love of a young man for his country.

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Publication Date: 18-07-2014

Although Shellshock is a play about war, about both sides of a battle which took place in Turkey 100 years ago, it is not a play that focuses on the battlefield itself with all the sounds and fury of war. Instead, it is a story told in an unexpected way, with characters you might not usually find in a war story….



When a mysterious visitor arrives from Turkey in 2015, young Tom Lindsay, his widowed father, Jack, and grandmother, June, all become embroiled in a drama which had its extraordinary origins at Gallipoli a hundred years before. Justin Fleming's exciting new play is for all people of all ages. It is a gripping story which, by gradual and intriguing revelations, takes us on a thrilling journey to the powerful heart of humanity.

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Publication Date: 18-07-2014

¨ What do English teachers understand by the word ‘creativity’?



¨ How does their understanding of creativity differ from the meanings that others ascribe to this word?



¨ What forms does creativity take in their classrooms?



Prompted by Raymond Williams's statement that creativity involves stepping from the 'known into the 'unknown', the contributors to this volume inquire into how their students explore the 'unknown' in a policy environment where everything is mapped out in advance by predetermined learning 'outcomes'. They see their classrooms as spaces for students to engage in imagination, play and learning that exceed the conventional expectations of standardised learning continua. However, rather than supposing that it is possible to transcend those settings, as in old-fashioned notions of creativity or giftedness, the authors carefully trace the ways in which moments of creativity still occur within the heavily regulated environments imposed on them by governments. Creativity, they argue, should be understood as a product of the institutional setting of the school, as something that is facilitated by the social relationships of the classroom, rather than falling back on to assumed binaries of school as a place of regulation and control and creativity as something that can only happen outside the school gates.



History has a privileged place in these essays, which draw on work from a number of key theorists in the history of English curriculum and related areas of the social science, including the work of Raymond Williams.

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Publication Date: 20-08-2014

Investigating Aesop’s Fables is an engaging, stimulating and challenging resource for junior secondary students which will help teachers implement the Australian Curriculum: English in an integrated and thoughtful way.



In the course of this unit of work, students investigate what makes a fable a fable, the relationship between Aesop’s fables and the society in which they were produced and circulated, and the ways in which one particular fable, ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’, has been told and retold over the years, by writers and visual artists as various as Jean de La Fontaine, Gustave Doré, Walt Disney, Somerset Maugham and John Ciardi. A diverse range of other texts is included, from a World War 1 propaganda poster to a political blog.



Assessment tasks have been constructed to provide clear evidence of students’ achievement of the relevant Standard.

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Publication Date: 20-08-2014

Sense, Shape, Symbol is an investigation of Australian poetry. It explores the ways in which poets succeed, or fail, in their attempts to bring their experience to life.



Their primary raw materials are the five senses - sight, sound, smell, taste and touch - the means by which we all experience our world.



Poets also like to experiment with the shape of their writing, starting with the qualities of vowels and consonants, of syllables, and of rhyme, metre and rhythm.



Working poets make particular use of the metaphor, of the connections that they suggest between normally unlike things, to express their response to their subject.



The collection explores the work of five poets who have played an important, influential part in the development of Australian poetry: Judith Wright, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, David Malouf, Les Murray and Mark O’Connor.



The final chapter looks at some of the common concerns that can create conflict in our lives, such as gender, race, age, and socio-economic status, and other issues that create fear and that encourage hope.



The collection is intended to allow readers to become familiar with the techniques that poets use, and to develop their own poetic writing in an informed way.

Bind: paperback

Publication Date: 23-04-2014