Child to Child Interaction

I have talked about the importance of teaching social skills in a one to one setting. The fact of the matter is some children need to learn social skills in a broken down fashion with an adult in small incremental parts. Once those small incremental parts are mastered, we're just ready for the next level. The next level would be to generalize those learnt skills in the natural environment with peers. The goal of providing direct instruction for any skill would be for that skill to generalize across people, materials and environments. This is where child to child interactions play a crucial role in generalized learning and mastered skills during direct interactions with peers. The goal would be for your child to use skills learned in contrived settings into the natural environment, for example, school or the playground. So what can we do to foster this? Something that worked really well with me when I worked in a mainstream school, as a behavior support specialist, was pairing my student with a peer mentor. This peer mentor was feisty, she was a leader and she really wanted to be a helper and she sort of naturally gravitated to this peer, they were best friends. They did everything together naturally even without my help. So it was just natural for me to incorporate this student in social skills acquisition for my student. So number one, we can identify strong peers and pair them with that child. We need to find strong peer characteristics. As I said, these include leadership an outgoing personality and natural inclination to help strong verbal and play skills. Why are these important? Because this student is essentially modeling the play behaviors that you want to see. We want to make sure that that model is as concise and as close to the target behavior as possible. That's why it's really important to find peers that have these characteristics. So our job and our job in this place game would be to prompt the peer and provide strategies for eliciting communication and other skill targets. But we need to be aware of not turning the peer into the teacher that is not their job. That's our job. Our job would be to encourage the peer to try to promote social skills and communication but we want to make that play experience wonderful and enjoyable for both. So the interactions should be natural. We want the play experience to be amazing for all the peers participating. Going back to my story about my student and the peer buddy - by the end of the year they were both requesting to go to each other's houses for social skills and activities completely devoid of my help, they just really enjoyed playing and spending time together. That was the goal, a genuine true friendship. 

So, they are some tips and tricks for fostering social communication and social interaction in the school environment. An integrated play based approach enables all children to be at equal levels in terms of relationships, and engaging in shared experiences with support from an adult. It's really important to note that the adult must be aware, to engage only as needed to provide play experiences that are organic or not unnatural. I say this because with all best intentions, when we're supporting kids in the classroom, we feel like we're doing the best when we're right in there when we're really involved in the game. 

In the natural environment at the playground, it's not the adults job to intervene in the play experience. The adult's job is to create an environment where the child can learn from other peers with as little adult interaction as possible. How do we get there? We get there by providing the appropriate support for that child to be successful. That could be, for example, the use of a social story. To prepare the child for what's coming up in the play experience. It could be the use of a peer mentor. It could be direct instruction, where we teach that child specific play skills in a one to one setting and then that child just generalizes that skill in the group environment. 

These are some examples of supports within the integrated play setting. Now integrated play based approaches promote generalization of cross curricular skills and to apply these skills in novel situations. So in my classroom, I was an early years special ed teacher for many years and I often incorporated integrated play experiences in everything that I did because every child has the right to learn and every child has the right to be included. It's my job to make sure that I'm setting up the environments in which that child is successful, included and fully integrated and honestly just having a good time. It encourages children to make new discoveries about their play experience, for them to take risks to try something new, to investigate the how's and the why's of play and to do so with their peers. So the sort of the big thing here is that they're doing it with their peers and with as little direct interaction with an adult as possible. Of course, if the child is struggling, you're going to be right in there providing that support but we want to foster an organic play experience for that child. 

I'll give you an example of what this could look like in a classroom. One day, I had some open ended materials. I had paint, I had cardboard, I had stamps, I basically had an array of open ended materials because I wanted to see what the kids would do with them. I also strategically chose those materials because I knew that the kids that I have targeted for social skills, acquisition targets, love these materials. So they immediately have an intrinsic motivation to be there. That's 50% of the battle for the child to want to be there. So I had these open ended materials out. We are able to foster a discussion about the different textures and colors of materials. For example, I know that a child is able to label colors and that they will be able to contribute to the overall discussion about the art materials. 

They can identify problems and solutions like gluing the materials and putting materials together, as you can imagine everybody loved it. There were only so many sprinkles and sparkles to go around and everybody wanted them. This is a really good opportunity to promote waiting and to promote turn taking. 

So right there I've already targeted so many social skills just in this open ended art activity. By expressing their creative ideas I had kids saying, look, Miss Jen, I drew you, I drew a car. 

If the child that I'm targeting for social skills acquisition isn't able to utter a sentence that long, but I know that they can say ball or something like that, then I would encourage them to talk about their art activity with a one word utterance. Making sure that they could contribute to the overall activity. 

I'm also reinforcing fine motor skills. As you can imagine with art activities, they're having to use their hands or having to use their fingers with cutting and gluing and opening and taking out and putting in. Some of these items are really hot items they had to wait for. If they asked me I would say, oh, ask your friend for the glue. So I'm again fostering social interaction with peers, and slowly fading myself out. But this is my opportunity to foster social interaction through requesting and I already talked about waiting for popular items, you can't have it all when you want, you have to wait for your turn, and of course, joint attention. 

So if I want there's two things here for joint attention. I could work on joint attention for the whole group. So if I'm leading an activity and I want all of the kids to orient to one thing, I would have the item in front of me. I would use gestures and my eye gaze and hopefully the whole group will engage in joint attention with me at the same time. If I want to target just one student for joint attention then I would orient myself to that student, again, use gestures and eye gaze and encourage joint attention that way. So the open ended art materials activity was a hit and it was integrated. It was an example of integrated play, because of course, I provided support as needed. We are incorporating all of the peers to play and providing enough support so that every child is, as much as possible, at an equal playing field in terms of experiencing the art activity in a positive way and really just feeling part of the group.