Contains a collection of ideas and games. This title includes games and activities that address particular communication themes, such as: listening techniques; speech sounds; vocabulary building; and friendship skills, while others cover several areas simultaneously.

"Who would have thought you could create a cat bed from a washing-up bowl, design a doll's house from an old shoe box or make a flower pot from a margarine tub - all on live television!" Valerie Singleton, Blue Peter presenter 1962-1972 "My ultimate favourite has to be Tracy Island. I loved all the little details, such as the bendable pipe cleaner, palm trees and that it was compatible with the shop bought Thunderbirds toys." Konnie Huq, Blue Peter presenter, 1997-2008 Blue Peter is the longest-running children's programme in the world. At its peak, before the days of streaming and social media, it notched up 8 million viewers an episode and received a thousand letters a day. Recently voted the UK's best children's TV programme of all time, it was - and remains - famous for its makes, all of which used inexpensive household items such as cereal boxes and squeezy bottles, as well as the essential sticky-backed plastic and rubber solution glue. This affectionate celebration of the favourite makes from the show, has facsimiles from the Blue Peter annuals and includes the iconic Advent Crown, made with wire coat hangers, tinsel and candles. A Christmas Door Decoration, made from a polystyrene ceiling tile, some more tinsel and a cake doily. A Luxury Cat Basket, made from a washingup bowl. Plant Pots using old margarine tubs. A Doll's House made from a shoebox (with furniture made from matchboxes). Plus, of course, the instructions for the Blue Peter version of Thunderbirds Tracy Island.

Domestic handicraft was an extraordinarily popular leisure activity in Victorian Britain, especially amongst middle-class women. Craftswomen pasted shells onto boxes, stitched fish scales onto silk, scorched patterns into wood, cast flower petals out of wax, and made needlework portraits of the royal spaniels. Yet despite its ubiquity, little has been written about this curious hobby. Providing a much-needed history of this under-studied phenomenon, Talia Schaffer demonstrates the importance of domestic handicraft in Victorian literature and culture.Novel Craft presents what Schaffer terms the "craft paradigm" -- a set of beliefs about representation, production, consumption, value, and beauty that were crucial to mid-Victorian thought. She uncovers how handicrafts expressed anxieties about modernity and offered an alternative to the conventional financial, political, and aesthetic ideas of the era. Novel Craft reveals how this mindset evolves in four major Victorian novels: Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each chapter centers on a scene of craft production that expresses the novel's ideals and also interrogates the novel itself as a form of craft, and each chapter highlights an influential craft genre: paper crafts, pressed flowers, knitting, and hair jewelry. The book closes with a coda on the current resurgent crafts movement of Etsy.com as a fresh version of a Victorian sensibility.Featuring illustrations from two centuries of domestic handicraft, Schaffer deftly combines cultural history and literary analyses to create a revealing portrait of a neglected part of nineteenth-century life and highlights its continuing relevance in today's world of Martha Stewart, women's magazine crafts, and a rapidly expanding alt craft culture.

Come on Down represents an introduction to popular media culture in Britain since 1945. It discusses the ways in which popular culture can be studied, understood and appreciated, and covers its key analytical issues and some of its most important forms and processes. The contributors analyse some of popular culture's leading and most representative expressions such as TV soaps, quizzes and game shows, TV for children, media treatment of the monarchy, Pop Music, Comedy, Advertising, Consumerism and Americanization. The diversity of both subject matter and argument is the most distinctive feature of the collection, making it a much-needed and extremely accessible, interdisciplinary introduction to the study of popular media culture. The contributors, many of them leading figures in their respective areas of study, represent a number of different approaches which themselves reflect the diversity and promise of contemporary theoretical debates. Their studies encompass issues such as the economics of popular culture, its textual complexity and its interpretations by audiences, as well as concepts such as ideology, material culture and postmodernism.

Children expect the earth from their fathers. They have to be able to conjure up games from thin air, to answer every question under the sun, to skim stones, and tell bedtime stories. Such perfect dads may exist. For the rest of us, there is DAD STUFF. DAD STUFF is packed with great things to do with kids. Some new, some traditional: how to learn to ride a bike without tears; how to play the spoons; a rainy afternoon's supply of knock knock jokes; a selection of magic tricks and how to answer 'Dad, where do babies come from?' There is a range of ideas to suit all situations -- games, puzzles, practical jokes and spooky urban myths. Not all dads are walking encyclopaedias and DAD STUFF will provide an easily recalled mine of useful and useless information with which kids can amaze their friends. Dads never need to be stuck for ideas again.

"An idiosyncratic adventure, pulling you in and saying: 'this is, in fact, not what you were looking for; but its much more interesting."' - Terry Pratchet This flagship title in the Brewer's series was first published in 1870 to supply readers with material that was both entertaining and improving. The new 18th edition is filled with hundreds of new facts from designer babies to New York's sewer-dwelling alligators and brings back over 200 classic entries such as magic garters and Poison detectors.