A guide for teachers about the importance of planning learning experiences that integrate child-centered play with rich content-based instruction. Serious Fun emphasizes a teachers’ active role in children’s play in order to guide learning. Organized into two sections, Serious Fun first looks at strategies teachers can use to connect play to learning. The second focuses on playful learning in math, literacy, drama, art, STEM, and outdoors. Serious Fun utilizes research based content to delve into the methods teachers can use to connect guided play to literacy and STEM learning principles. Each chapter sets the stage for the concepts being explored and wraps up with practical tips for teachers to use in their classrooms. It also includes a handy two-page section for parents about the benefits of play and how to support their children’s learning through play. Serious Fun: How guided play extends children’s learning provides many opportunities for the reader to consider important basic questions about the adult’s role in children’s play and the relations of teaching, playing, and learning with the focus on preschoolers and kindergartener. Many important forms of learning happen when intentional teaching is occurring, with play actions and thoughts of children one of multiple influences. Play is valuable, certainly, even when it does not contribute to the curriculum, and even if teachers are not involved. Nevertheless, this book draws attention to teacher (or parental) roles of providing background experiences, making play provisions, and implementing interactional strategies when these role responsibilities are directed to guiding the play of young children. Guided play is defined as the coming together of child-initiated play or exploration and adult guidance of the playing child in the service of developmental or educational aims, keeping in mind the importance of child autonomy and choice-making. The co-editors in their introduction offer as an advance organizer: Engage with the ideas presented throughout the book, considering children’s roles as active agents in their own learning and your own role in setting high expectations for children and helping them meet those expectations. Adult guided play needs to be examined in relation to other ways adults relate to children’s play. There is an important difference between adult-directed play and adult guided play, as well as between adult-child joint play (teacher as co-player/playmate, a rarity in school settings) and adult guided child play. Teacher observation and setting the stage for play distally and proximally (including making moment-to-moment situational adjustments) are constant, but whether adult’s interventions occur inside or outside the play frame varies. An extending style of adult guidance seeks to nurture ongoing play enactments preserving the play episode, but a redirecting style usually disrupts it. Co-editors Marie L. Masterson and Holly Bohart prepare the reader by noting, As you will see from the chapters in this book, there are a variety of ways to balance child initiation and choice with intentional adult scaffolding that adds to children’s present knowledge and abilities. Adult play guidance is multi-dimensional and can serve many purposes in early education as the text attractively and clearly illustrates. The volume is organized into two sections, Part One: Intentionally Creating Play Environments for Learning, and Part Two: Providing Rich Content Experiences Through Play. Part One’s two chapters are “Brain Science and Guided Play” by Brenna Hassinger-Das, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and “Observing, Planning, Guiding: How an Intentional Teacher Meets Standards Through Play” by Patricia McDonald. Part Two’s chapter three is entitled “Supporting Language Through Culturally Rich Dramatic Play” by Irasema Salinas-Gonzalez, Maria G. Arreguin-Anderson, and Iliana Alanis; chapter four “Connecting Art, Literacy, and Drama Through Storytelling”,Bonnie Ripstein; chapter five “Playful Math Instruction and Standards” by Deborah Stipek; chapter six “ Fostering Positive Experiences in the Math Center for African American Boys” by Danielle. B. Davis and Dale C. Farran; chapter seven “What Can You Do with Bamboo? Preschoolers Explore a Natural Material: by Condie Collins Ward; and chapter eight “ Engaging and Enriching Play is Rigorous Learning” by Shannon Riley-Ayers and Alexandra Figueras-Daniel. Support for playful learning coming from the sources this book cites which include the American Academy of Pediatrics Report on the power of play, NAEYC’s Position Statement on equity and diversity, and NAEYC Professional Standards and Competencies for Early Childhood Educators. The supporting research documentation for play overlaps with and is relevant to the book’s argument for guided playful learning. However, playful learning is not identical to adult guided playful learning. This review has already mentioned the f