Supporting social play skills with peers through modelling and demonstration – Early Years – Cognition and Learning
Last Updated - March 7, 2024
Supporting social play skills with peers through modelling and demonstration – Early Years – Cognition and Learning
Develop the child’s social play skills. Use the child’s strong play preferences to build up their engagement with adults and peers starting with securing successful parallel play.
Specifically practice turn taking activities with the child and peers. It may be necessary to avoid the child’s motivators or special interests in the play as these may be a barrier to the child managing giving up a turn.
Use Teaching Play to children with Autism – Practical interventions using Identiplay. This resource will provide a large number of play scripts that can be shared with teaching staff and parents.
Provide a visual picture sequence strip to support messages, planning events and routines and individual activities.
Some children may need to see objects to cue their understanding and planning for change, using an object transition bag, rather than pictures.
Use Makaton signing to emphasise concepts or key words in messages. Sign up for free on the Makaton Charity website www.makaton.org for access to the Library and information about the Makaton Language Programme.
Make activities ‘fail safe’ (Portage Principles) by using strategies such as backward/forward chaining, where steps to achieve a skill are broken down into manageable goals. The adult completes the first steps, and the child then finishes off the activity (backward chaining). Similarly, the child starts the process and the adult continues the steps to completion. Teach the easiest skills first in a sequence by identifying the ‘component skills or achievable targets and then deciding.
Use real life objects to demonstrate the use of objects on yourself-first before transferring the play action onto dolls/toys e.g., talking on the telephone, drinking from a cup/sports bottle,
Develop concept and sorting skills through encouraging the child to develop matching, then finding and then naming skills.
Understanding ‘the same’ with objects e.g., sorting lots of different balls and toy cars into two groups when tidying toys. Use pictures of the toys on the boxes to encourage object to picture matching.
Play simple object and picture lotto with objects in a bag and white boards to draw the items you want to match. Manipulate the number of items on the board to make it easier or harder for each player.
