Social competence at the playground: Preschoolers during recess

Social interactions at the playground have been represented as a rich learning opportunity to hone and master social skills at pre- school years. Specifically, all forms of social play (fantasy, role, ex- ercise or rough-and-tumble) have been related to children’s social competence. The main goal of this study was to examine whether it is a certain kind of social play which facilitates the development of social competence, or if it is just the opportunity for interacting during recess that provides children with an optimal environment for social learning. A total of 73 preschoolers (4–6 years old) were videotaped at the school’s playground. Teachers provided assess- ments of children’s social competence. Children’s interactions at the playground were assessed through an innovative measuring method, based on radio-frequency identification devices. The results showed a positive association between exercise play and children’s social competence. In contrast with the literature, both forms of pretend play, fantasy and role play were unrelated to children’s social competence. Smaller peer groups and longer interactions also demonstrated a positive association with these preschoolers’ social competence. The study shows the importance of outdoor physical play for preschoolers’ social success. More- over, the study suggests that the environment in which children play has an important effect on the adaptive nature of their play.

Social competence at the playground: Preschoolers during recess

Social interactions at the playground have been represented as a rich learning opportunity to hone and master social skills at preschool years. Specifically, all forms of social play (fantasy, role, exercise or rough-and-tumble) have been related to children’s social competence. The main goal of this study was to examine whether it is a certain kind of social play which facilitates the development of social competence, or if it is just the opportunity for interacting during recess that provides children with an optimal environment for social learning. A total of 73 preschoolers (4–6 years old) were videotaped at the school’s playground. Teachers provided assessments of children’s social competence. Children’s interactions at the playground were assessed through an innovative measuring method, based on radio-frequency identification devices. The results showed a positive association between exercise play and children’s social competence. In contrast with the literature, both forms of pretend play, fantasy and role play were unrelated to children’s social competence. Smaller peer groups and longer interactions also demonstrated a positive association with these preschoolers’ social competence. The study shows the importance of outdoor physical play for preschoolers’ social success. Moreover, the study suggests that the environment in which children play has an important effect on the adaptive nature of their play.

Preschoolers’ free play - connections with emotional and social functioning

Play has an important role in various aspects of children’s development. However, time for free play has declined substantially over the last decades. To date, few studies have focused on the relationship between opportunities for free play and children’s social functioning. The aims of this study are to examine whether children ́s free play is related to their social functioning and whether this relationship is mediated by children ́s emotional functioning. Seventy-eight children (age, 55- 77 months) were tested on their theory of mind and emotion understanding. Parents reported on their children’s time for free play, empathic abilities, social competence and externalizing behaviors. The main findings showed that free play and children’s theory of mind are negatively related to externalizing behaviors. Empathy was strongly related to children’s social competence, but free play and social competence were not associated. Less time for free play is related to more disruptive behaviors in preschool children, however certain emotional functioning skills influence these behaviors independently of the time children have for free play. These outcomes suggest that free play might help to prevent the development of disruptive behaviors, but future studies should further examine the causality of this relationship.

Into the looking glass: Literacy acquisition and mirror invariance in preschool and first-grade children

At what point in reading development does literacy impact object recognition and orientation processing? Is it specific to mirror images? To answer these questions, forty-six 5- to 7-year-old preschoolers and first graders performed two same–different tasks differing in the matching criterion-orientation-based versus shape-based (orientation independent)-on geometric shapes and letters. On orientation-based judgments, first graders out- performed preschoolers who had the strongest difficulty with mirrored pairs. On shape-based judgments, first graders were slower for mirrored than identical pairs, and even slower than preschoolers. This mirror cost emerged with letter knowledge. Only first graders presented worse shape-based judgments for mirrored and rotated pairs of reversible (e.g., b-d; b-q) than nonreversible (e.g., e-ә) letters, indicating readers’ difficulty in ignoring orientation contrasts relevant to letters.