Welcome to Our Playground: A Celebration of Games Children Play Everywhere

K-Gr 3–Representative of most of the countries of the world and all the inhabited continents, this full-color book on play is structured by theme and includes games and forms of play from throughout the world. The themes include categories of games, location where games can be played, games that are played afterschool and play activities, such as dancing, puppets, etc. As an example, the spread devoted to tag games include selections from Pakistan, India, United Kingdom, Greece, and Italy. The cherubic children are diverse and wearing modern-day Western clothing—shorts, t-shirts, jeans, jackets, shoes—for a few pages on historical games or traditional games, the kids are seen wearing clothes appropriate to that culture. The overarching thesis of the book is that even though there are cultural differences, kids have been playing in the same manner throughout the world and throughout time. This universality of childhood, beyond borders, is introduced through transliteration of names of the games and phrases useful in playing from languages other than English. However, the transliteration does not also include the original script of the language. Of the cultures represented, most of them are the dominant one of the country, with a few inclusions, like Basque and Hmong; the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon are not named. The book includes a table of contents divided forms of play. An advance review copy had a typo with the Vietnamese phrase for “Let’s play.”