Rewilding Children’s Imaginations is a practical and creative resource designed to engage children in the natural world through folktales, storytelling, and artmaking. The guide introduces 21 folklore stories from across the world alongside 99 creative activities, spanning nature and the four seasons of the year. Using the lens of folktales and myths of the land, children are encouraged to explore a variety of activities and exercises across different arts media, from visual art making to storytelling, drama, and movement. This resource: Helps teachers and group facilitators to build confidence in offering a range of creative learning experiences, inspired by nature. Provides a collection of easy-to-use, cross-curricular and storytelling activities. Allows children to connect with nature, their imagination, and folktales from around the world. Builds new skills in oracy, artmaking, collaboration, wellbeing, care of the environment, diversity, respect, and tolerance, and more. Inspires children to tell stories and make art both individually and collaboratively, helping them build confidence as active creators in their community. Shares creative tools and positive learning experiences to inspire children, teachers, and parents across the school year. Rewilding Children’s Imaginations brings together nature, art, and oral storytelling in easy and accessible ways to help children connect with the world around them, as well as with their own emotional landscapes. It is essential and enjoyable reading for primary teachers and early years professionals, outdoors practitioners, therapists, art educators, community and youth workers, home schoolers, parents, carers, and families.

Mike Fairclough invites parents to facilitate their children’s naturally rebellious nature to help them thrive in a turbulent world. Discover the revolutionary path to incredible parenting and embrace your child's free spirit, inspire their imagination, and prepare them for a confident, empowered future. This isn't your average parenting book. This is a call for rebellion: a liberating, transformative, joyful rebellion, proven to encourage confidence and resilience in children. Rewilding Childhood offers game-changing strategies, tools, and techniques to help you raise empowered children who will thrive in this unpredictable world. Renowned headmaster and father-of-four Mike Fairclough's tried-and-tested approach shares how to nurture your child's naturally rebellious side, encourage their sense of adventure and independence, and help them develop optimism about the future and gratitude for the world around them. This trailblazing book includes: • practical, liberating exercises to explore freedom and creativity with your child • advice on how to set non-restrictive goals and positive intentions • examples of how play and games can improve problem-solving and enhance imagination • tips on how to encourage your child to reconnect with nature, from looking under stones for insects to journeying into forests and fields • simple ways to help your child step outside their comfort zone and build confidence in their own abilities Encouraging children to explore and reconnect with their adventurous side is more important than ever. Full of down-to-earth advice, honesty, and positivity, this book will encourage both you and your child to move beyond the boundaries of everyday life to become self-assured, secure and, above all, happy.

This volume presents key contributions to the study of ecocriticism in Nordic children’s and YA literary and cultural texts, in dialogue with international classics. It investigates the extent to which texts for children and young adults reflect current environmental concerns. The chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: Ethics and Aesthetics, Landscape, Vegetal, Animal, and Human, and together they explore Nordic representations and a Nordic conception, or feeling, of nature. The textual analyses are complemented with the lived experiences of outdoor learning practices in preschools and schools captured through children’s own statements. The volume highlights the growing influence of posthumanist theory and the continuing traces of anthropocentric concerns within contemporary children’s literature and culture, and a non-dualistic understanding of nature-culture interaction is reflected in the conceptual tool of the volume: The Nature in Culture Matrix.

Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.

This handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the history, theory, and current practices of rewilding. Rewilding offers a transformational paradigm shift in conservation thinking, and as such is increasingly of interest to academics, policymakers, and practitioners. However, as a rapidly emerging area of conservation, the term has often been defined and used in a variety of different ways (both temporally and spatially). There is, therefore, the need for a comprehensive assessment of this field, and the Routledge Handbook of Rewilding fills this lacuna. The handbook is organised into four sections to reflect key areas of rewilding theory, practice, and debate: the evolution of rewilding, theoretical and practical underpinnings, applications and impacts, and the ethics and philosophy of rewilding. Drawing on a range of international case studies the handbook addresses many of the key issues, including land acquisition and longer-term planning, transitioning from restoration (human-led, nature enabled) to rewilding (nature-led, human enabled), and the role of political and social transformational change. Led by an editorial team who have extensive experience researching and practising rewilding, this handbook is essential reading for students, academics and practitioners interested in rewilding, ecological restoration, natural resource management and conservation.

How rewilding has transformed the conservation movement, combining radical scientific insights with practical innovations. Progressive scientists and conservation professionals are pursuing a radical new approach to restoring ecosystems: rewilding. By recovering the ripple effect generated by the interactions among plant and animal species and natural disturbances, rewilding seeks to repair ecosystems by removing them from human engineering and reassembling guilds of megafauna from a mix of surviving wild and feral species and de-domesticated breeds, including elk, bison, and feral horses. Written by two leaders in the field, this book offers an abundantly illustrated guide to the science of rewilding. It shows in fascinating detail the ways in which ecologists are reassembling ecosystems that allow natural interactions rather than human interventions to steer their environmental trajectories. Rewilding looks into a past in which industrialization and globalization downgraded grasslands, describes current projects designed to recover self-willed ecosystems, and envisions the future with ten predictions for a rewilded planet. It shows how rewilding is shaking up conservation science and policy, bringing new hope and renewed purpose to efforts to revive essential ecological processes. Color illustrations capture moments of beauty in nature and offer enlightening infographics and visualizations.

'A dazzling illustrated edition of a 'hugely useful and fascinating resumé of rewilding' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 'Compelling ... succinct and objective' Financial Times Rewilding reveals the ways in which ecologists are restoring the lost interactions between animals, plants, and natural disturbances that are the essence of thriving ecosystems. It looks into a past in which industrialization and globalization have downgraded our grasslands; at present projects restoring plants and animals to their natural, untamed state; and into the future, with ten predictions for a rewilded planet. This illustrated edition combines beautiful natural history images with infographic flow-charts depicting the 'trophic cascades' of biodiverse ecosystems, to explore a brave new world repopulated with wild horses and cattle, beavers, rhinos, and wolves. 'A masterly job, explaining the science behind rewilding in an accessible, honest and compelling way. It deserves to be widely read and become a book of great influence.' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding.

The ability to communicate is an essential life skill for all children and young people and it underpins their social, emotional and educational development. If a child experiences a positive relationship with an adult listening carefully, they are more likely to constructively share their thoughts, feelings and their imaginative ideas. That’s My Story! places children’s imagined stories at the heart of their own development and provides a joyful, creative approach to support young children’s personal and social development and to encourage their communication. In this book you will find: Tried-and-tested drama games and activities that support communication and well-being, all adaptable to complement your current practice Guidance and advice on how to promote positive adult-child interactions Examples of creative interventions that support children’s communication development A celebration of the joy that comes with carefully listening to children’s own imagined stories Those of us who work with children can sense a tangible connection between how young children feel and how they communicate. This essential and practical resource will be valuable reading for primary teachers, teaching assistants, speech and language therapists, and drama practitioners, as well as outreach and education departments of theatre companies and other arts organisations.

It’s spring 2020 and fifteen-year-old Molly McFlynn is uprooted from town life by her mam to live with her bohemian grandparents in rural Northumberland. Molly is furious – her friends abandon her, the food is inedible and her grandmother is doing strange things in the garden at night.