This collection of essays highlights the importance of water imagery in the work of the renowned nineteenth-century French female author George Sand. It provides a complex picture of the polyvalent presence of water in Sand’s work that encompasses life and death imagery, ecocriticism, fluid kinship, homosocial ties, and artistic creativity. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s premise that the substance of water carries deep meaning, the articles in this volume explore the element of water and its symbolism in a selection of George Sand’s writings and art work, from her most famous novels (Indiana, Lélia, and Consuelo) to her later works, short stories, plays, and autobiographical writing (Teverino, Jean de la Roche, Les Maîtres sonneurs, La Reine Coax, L’Homme de neige, Le Drac, Un Hiver à Majorque, Marianne), and dendrite paintings.

Give your sand and water sessions a new lease of life with this fully updated Little Book. Split into two sections, it offers a range of activities for sand and water play that link to the early learning goals and which are accompanied by a list of suggested resources, useful vocabulary and related songs and stories to take the theme further.

Play provides young children with the opportunity to express their ideas, symbolize, and test their knowledge of the world. It provides the basis for inquiry in literacy, science, social studies, mathematics, art, music, and movement. Through play, young children become active learners engaged in explorations about themselves, their community, and their personal-social world. An Integrated Play-Based Curriculum for Young Children offers the theoretical framework for understanding the origins of an early childhood play-based curriculum and how young children learn and understand concepts in a social and physical environment. Distinguished author Olivia N. Saracho then explores how play fits into various curriculum areas in order to help teachers develop their early childhood curriculum using developmentally and culturally appropriate practice. Through this integrated approach, young children are able to actively engage in meaningful and functional experiences in their natural context. Special Features Include: Vignettes of children’s conversations and actions in the classroom Suggestions for activities and classroom materials Practical examples and guidelines End-of-chapter summaries to enhance and extend the reader’s understanding of young children By presenting appropriate theoretical practices for designing and implementing a play-based curriculum, An Integrated Play-Based Curriculum for Young Children offers pre-service teachers the foundational knowledge about the field, about the work that practitioners do with young children, and how to best assume a teacher’s role effectively.

TheArti?cialLifetermappearedmorethan20yearsagoinasmallcornerofNew Mexico, USA. Since then the area has developed dramatically, many researchers joining enthusiastically and research groups sprouting everywhere. This frenetic activity led to the emergence of several strands that are now established ?elds in themselves. We are now reaching a stage that one may describe as maturer: with more rigour, more benchmarks, more results, more stringent acceptance criteria, more applications, in brief, more sound science. This, which is the n- ural path of all new areas, comes at a price, however. A certain enthusiasm, a certain adventurousness from the early years is fading and may have been lost on the way. The ?eld has become more reasonable. To counterbalance this and to encourage lively discussions, a conceptual track, where papers were judged on criteria like importance and/or novelty of the concepts proposed rather than the experimental/theoretical results, has been introduced this year. A conference on a theme as broad as Arti?cial Life is bound to be very - verse,but a few tendencies emerged. First, ?elds like ‘Robotics and Autonomous Agents’ or ‘Evolutionary Computation’ are still extremely active and keep on bringing a wealth of results to the A-Life community. Even there, however, new tendencies appear, like collective robotics, and more speci?cally self-assembling robotics, which represent now a large subsection. Second, new areas appear.