Reviews five books on talk in the classroom; teaching with humor and play; how children talk, write, dance, draw, and sing their understanding of the world; talented teenagers; and life histories of women teachers working for social change. (BAC)

Noting that while laboratory investigations of recordings of children's spontaneous verbal creations or repetitions of traditional forms in their natural play habitats have indicated that they do engage in systematic explorations of language structures in their play, this paper points out that there have been no investigations of whether such…