Creating and Maintaining Play Connection in a Toddler Peer Group

Abstract

This study explores how one and two year old peers (henceforth toddlers) participate in joint play activities in a natural group-care setting. We focus on joint play activity between three toddler peers during one full day-care day in a Finnish toddler classroom. Questions guiding the analysis concern the sequential understanding of how play emerges within peer interaction and how toddler peers are able to build sustained co-participation in their joint play during the day. The analysis showed that joint play was fragmented and organized in short segments of dyadic or triadic interaction. Reestablishments of joint play and accumulation of significant play signals during the day were important practices for toddlers to constitute social organization and sustained co-participation in their multi-party peer play. The results strengthen our understanding of very young children as both more and less competent play companions in their peer groups and guide adults' practice in relation to peer play in toddler classrooms.

Calibrating joint attention and affective stances in young children's peer interactions

“…The stance taken by the recipients in their response turns demonstrated their assessment of the object and its noteworthiness, and it confirmed or rejected the speaker's stance. Peer responses involved a continuum of actions: the recipients could i) ignore the summons, ii) respond with a neutral stance, simply acknowledging the speaker or the object through gaze, iii) respond with a different, incongruent, stance that contradicted the peer's claim of noteworthiness, or iv) align with the prior speaker by displaying a congruent affective stance (e.g., Cekaite and Andr en, 2019;Pursi and Lipponen, 2020). Below we discuss the multimodal interactional organization of children's initiating turns and outline the various interactional trajectories that emerged through peer responses.…”