Magical ideation has been shown to be related to measures of hand preference, in which those with mixed handedness exhibit higher levels of magical ideation than those with either consistent left- or right-handedness. It is unclear whether the relation between magical ideation and hand preference is the result of a bias in questionnaire-taking…

Like many a modern play theorist, both Mark Twain and Walt Disney were enchanted by the way children act out stories, in particular pirate tales. For both Twain and Disney, this fascination grew out of their small-town, midwestern boyhoods, where avid reading and fantasy play helped stave off boredom and fill emotional gaps for both of them. Even…

The author contends that reading some narratives of make-believe can become for many children the ultimate form of fantasy play, providing them with a sense of control absent in their real world. She employs terms from French structuralist critic Gérard Genette, from Austrian child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, and from English pediatrician D. W.…

It is the third week that Ms. Sotto's preschool classroom has been turned into an airport. The literacy center is a ticket counter, with a travel agency complete with child-made passports, tickets, and travel brochures. What is happening in Ms. Sotto's classroom is an example of what most early childhood educators mean when they talk about…

The authors use Noam Chomsky's theories about generative grammar to discuss the notion of linguistic creativity they believe lies at the core of storytelling as Salman Rushdie pictures it in his novel, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories." The production of meaning through the use of narrative helps explain the rules of the literary game,…

Before children learn to read, they act like readers when they play with materials and objects like readers. In play, children beam their projective imagination upon inert material things and animate them with fantasy, infusing objects with meaning. The question of "the real" haunts the psychology of play and through play, the theory of fantasy:…

The aim of this article is to assess the measurement invariance of the Bermond-Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ) in U.S. Anglo (n = 490) and U.S. Hispanic (n = 379) samples of college students. The BVAQ items demonstrated invariance of the factor loadings, the latent item intercepts, and unique factor variances. However, Hispanics had higher…

Millions of children and adults devote much of their leisure time to playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Most observers commonly categorize computer games as a play activity, but this article asks whether MMORPGs contain activities that might not be play. The author examines the phenomenon of online gaming and…

Vivian Gussin Paley is a teacher, writer, lecturer, and advocate for the importance of play for young children. Author of a dozen books about children learning through play, she has received numerous honors and awards including an Erickson Institute Award for Service to Children, a MacArthur Foundation Fellows award, and a John Dewey Society's…

The author analyses two award-winning juvenile novels, "Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson and "Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy" by Gary Schmidt. Each novel portrays a deep friendship between a boy and girl who cross a stream (or river) into a world that includes fantasy, play, closeness to nature and animals, and a sense of the…

Based on the testimony of others, children learn about a variety of figures that they never meet. We ask when and how they are able to differentiate between the historical figures that they learn about (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) and fantasy characters (e.g., Harry Potter). Experiment 1 showed that both younger (3- and 4-year-olds) and older children…

Questionnaires were completed by 5th-, 8th-, and 11th-grade public schools students in rural and suburban school districts and by undergraduates at two universities in the United States (n = 1,242). They were asked about their orientation to video games--the amount of time they played, their motives for doing so, and the game types they…

Children seem to naturally gravitate to particular interests, be it sports, the arts, or any of a myriad of other pursuits. Their area of interest seems an integral part of who they are so that they seem to have been "born that way." Even when a child is challenged--physically, cognitively, behaviorally, emotionally--their essence still seems to…

Western Europe has been constructed in the field of education abroad as a "traditional" location: in some sense or another that label is used to suggest that it has a kind of static or dormant significance. In reality, Western Europe is an enormously rich location for study abroad precisely because it is a fluid learning environment that…

The authors review the research on children's imagination and fantasy as they relate to children's socio-emotional and cognitive development and link those findings to children's academic and classroom competence. Specifically, children who are imaginative and/or fantasy prone tend to have better coping skills and the ability to regulate their…