SayPro DESCRIBE THE IMPACT OF GROUP DYNAMICS DURING PLAY;

Although it may not be apparent at first glance, children in a preschool class illustrate many interesting patterns of social organization. Even as they chase one another, ride tricycles, build and destroy block houses, hit each other, and move in and out of social play, there are patterns in the apparent disorganization of these behaviours. Closer scrutiny reveals that certain children consistently tend to play together, other children play with many different peers, and a few others tend to play alone much of the time.Joining a group can be a challenge for anyone, least of all a young child with under-developed social skills. Figure below depicts Schutz’s conceptualisation of interpersonal relations which casts the task of becoming a member of a group as a three-step process involving inclusion, control and affection:This model suggests a hierarchy of needs which face a young child as they begin the process of ‘fitting in’: Above all, Schutz believes, the child needs to be recognised as one of the group. Once that is achieved, they will need to know which group members are the ones who make and/or enforces the rules. And finally, they will then want to feel valued in some way to set the seal on their group membership. For those facilitating group activities, this can be a helpful way of viewing some of the difficulties children experience in a group context.Social relationships within the groupConsidering the elements of inclusion, control and affection in more detail, Schutz developed a more sophisticated model – his Matrix of Relevant Interpersonal Data – to define the different roles adopted by group membersThis creates a sociometric tool for interpreting the actions of group members and making a quantitative assessment of the degree to which a child exhibits the social behaviours listed in the left-hand column. For instance, a child’s ‘expressed inclusion’ measures the extent to which he personally tries to engage and interact with others. The right-hand column suggests that where his effort is very high he might be described as “oversocial”, whereas if he rarely employs this behaviour he might be rated as “undersocial”.Effective friendships are formed when the relationship is reciprocal and emerge out successful play between children and their contemporaries. Those successful at creating meaningful relationships will also do well academically and deal better with life’s stresses and strains.Recess and play sessions are times when social issues at school come to the fore. During recess there is often minimal adult supervision and making an opportune time for peer interactions. Those that fare successfully at recess tend to be those that are more accepted and have more friends. Yet, four percent of children tend not to be accepted by any play partner or classmate; the others are rejected or neglected. Rejected children are actively disliked and told they cannot play with those they would like to play with, while neglected children are passively disliked by not being chosen to play with their classmates. Neglected children often get into conflicts during recess signalling real issues in peer acceptance and struggle to make or maintain friendships, yet rarely get assistance in this matter. Even when invited to play, they lack the skills to engage properly and often become disliked and thought of as unresponsive. Whatever friendships they do have are not well established and they often complain of being lonely during recess and resort to physical fighting, and are extremely sensitive to arguing and teasing. Whereas arguments between friends often result in compromise, this is not so with neglected children. Children, like adults, tend to attribute worse judgements on group outsiders, rendering it more difficult for a child playing with a non-friend to resolve conflicting issuesIn schools, as in other arenas, larger groups will often splinter into subgroups creating cliques and forming in-group and out-group biases; these groups need to be managed. My experience strongly suggests that intervening and managing group interactions is integral to leading groups of children and young people, whether in a formal or informal setting.Homophily and sex segregation in young children’s social systems Preschools are primarily designed to emphasize learning through play activities. In these play-based activities, children spend much of their time engaged in relatively unstructured activities that provide opportunities for peer interaction. For most children, preschool is their first opportunity to have extended contact with many different same-age peers. In addition, during the preschool years important changes take place in the general pattern of social behavior. Specifically, the preschool period is a time when children move from a general tendency to play alone or alongside other children towards increasing levels of true social interactive play. Thus, over the course of preschool, we often see the emergence of social behaviours that reflect an orientation towards affiliation and engagement with peers. The transition to a peer orientation is more difficult for some children than others.Children who are shy, inhibited, socially unskilled, or dysregulated may find this preschool transition particularly aversive or stressful. For example, Watamura and colleagues (Watamura, Donzella, Alwin, & Gunnar, 2003; Watamura, Sebanc, & Gunnar, 2002) found that cortisol (a stress-sensitive hormone) levels rose across the day at child care, but not in the same children when they were at home. This increase was more dramatic for toddlers and pre-schoolers than infants and more dramatic for socially inhibited children. Although the processes that account for such rises are unclear, we speculate that the highly social nature of peer interactions at preschool increases the social stressors that children face. How pre-schoolers react and respond to these social challenges may set the stage for development of behaviours and attitudes related to peer interactions and management of social networks and groups. Thus, the preschool period may be a time when children are particularly responsive to the peer system, making it a rich time to investigate the dynamics of early social interactional developm

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