A Study On Cross-Age Children's Tnteraction In Unstructured Group

Peer interaction is the main content of early childhood social learning.Children's peer interaction activities have an important role and value for them to learn how to get along well with people and adapt to social life.Different organizational forms of play activities in kindergartens have different effects on the development of children's peers' communicative activities.The open game atmosphere created by mixed age games in B kindergarten of H city is conducive to promoting children's free association,cooperation and communication in the game process.In this autonomous game environment,the game activities carried out by young children are a typical form of unstructured group activities.This paper attempts to explore how the free and open interpersonal communication and communication environment created by the unstructured group for young children affects the communicative behavior of peers and young children?Will there still be age,gender and other differences?What is the social network of young children under the influence of unstructured group activities?What is the relationship between young children's social behavior and their social networks in unstructured group activities?What factors will affect young children's peer interaction in unstructured group?This series of questions will be discussed in this study.The researchers observed and recorded the peer interactions among children of different ages in the mixed-age game activities in H-city B kindergarten,and collected and transcribed 210 cases of peer interactions among children of different ages,A total of 90 children aged 4-5 and 5-6 years old are involved.Researchers believe that in the unstructured group,older children have more social experience than young children,but this asymmetrical relationship is more likely to enable young children to accumulate experience and develop in the process of interaction.After observing the behavior of peers in middle school and eldest children,we found that:(1)From the initiation of communication events,there were more peer-to-peer incidents initiated from eldest children than those from middle-class children;the girls initiated more peer-to-peer incidents than boys.(2)In the unstructured group,there are differences in the communication strategies used by middle school children in the process of communication;there is no difference in the choice of communication strategies among children of different genders.(3)From the perspective of children's peer interaction,there are differences in the way of interaction between children of different ages in unstructured group;There is no difference in the way of communicating between children of different gender.(4)From the duration of children's peer interaction,the intercourse between children of different ages is dominated by a round type in the unstructured group.The persistence of interaction between boys and girls is also different.(5)In the unstructured group,children use different peer interaction strategies and methods under different game types.(6)In the unstructured group,the results of children's peer interaction are correlated partly with the communication strategies used by the initiators of communication behavior,and strong correlated with the communication strategies used by the communicative behavior feeders.In order to understand the effect of unstructured group activities on peer interaction of children of different ages,the researchers also explored the relationship between children's peer interaction behavior and their social networks under the influence of unstructured group activities.The study found that the factors that affect the interaction between eldest children and mid-class children in the unstructured group mainly include:(1)Limitations of children's own cognitive level.(2)Restrictions on communication situations and activity materials.(3)Familiarity among children and the frequency and quality of teachers' guidance.(4)Insufficient communication motives and initiative of children.Based on this,the targeted recommendations presented in this study are:Create a game environment with unstructured group characteristics to stimulate the enthusiasm of the children;such as providing a variety of game materials,creating an open and autonomous sharing game area,and promoting familiarity among young chikdren,etc.Give full play to the role of Teachers and raise the level of Children's Communication;Such as improving teachers' ability of observation and analysis,and improving teachers,ability to guide children's activities.