Why Is It Important to Create Opportunities to Support Peer Interactions?
Research indicates that by providing planned and systematic opportunities (i.e., opportunities that occur consistently) for peer interactions, children engage in more social interactions throughout the day and have more opportunities to practice emerging social skills. Through interactions during routine activities such as snack, arrival time, and clean up time, children practice targeted social skills more often and learn the skills more rapidly. Research also documents improved generalization of social skills from targeted activities to other times of the day. For example, an extremely shy child who begins talking with a peer as they set up snack together might begin talking with this same peer during center time. Because social interactions are embedded into ongoing activities, children are able to access “natural” reinforcers (e.g., friends), thus keeping motivation to engage in these interactions high. Throughout the day, there are many opportunities to include peer interactions u
