By the age of three or four years old, most children have acquired an awareness of themselves as a separate personality from their peers and are beginning to be able to identify the similarities and differences in their likes and dislikes that connect them to and distinguish them from their friends. Practitioners can help children develop learning partnerships with each other.
Making contact
* Provide opportunities for the children to make connections with each other by introducing them to each other by name. Model how to smile when you are introduced and say something positive about each child.
* Rehearse with the children saying 'hello' and how to look happy and then sad.
* Resource an area with mirrors so that children see the difference in their facial expressions between looking happy and looking sad. Discuss with the children occasions when they were happy working with a particular friend.
* Talk about how you know when a friend is happy or sad and ask the children for suggestions on how to cheer up a friend.
Promoting learning partners
* Use circle time to invite children to introduce their friend to the group. Encourage the children to say what makes their friend happy or sad and show some of their friend's work.
* Build on this activity in later circle time sessions by suggesting scenarios for the children to act out in pairs such as cleaning their teeth, laughing, sneezing, waking up and feeling cold.
* Extend the activity by asking one child from each of the pairs to describe to the rest of the group what is being acted out.
Working together
Use collaborative games and communal sharing times to celebrate the children's cultural and ethnic experiences. Create opportunities for everyone to contribute to discussions and encourage conversation, observations and joint decision-making between learning partners. Try some of the following activities that encourage children to work together:
* Everyone draws a picture of their favourite place and talks about it.
Their partner listens and suggests a place that they think their partner would not like.
* Build a theme trail or series in which pairs of children collect objects according to certain criteria, such as, 'First find something soft, and then hard, and then cold...'
* In pairs try to programme a malfunctioning 'robot'. Whatever the instruction, the robot does the opposite. To play, one child wears a robot hat (a box covered with silver foil and a rectangle cut out to look through), the other child calls out instructions ('Turn right', 'Stand up', 'Walk slowly', and so on), and the robot, of course, does the opposite of what is wanted. Challenge children with more experience to guide their robot to the door without it going off in the wrong direction or crashing into any furniture.
* Use a collection of different sized pillows, foam wedges and cushions to make a pillow mountain and cover the heap with a large sheet. Encourage a pair of children to help each other climb from the bottom to the top of the mountain.
* Play 'Pass the smile and other things' in fours. Everyone sits in a group looking very sad except the first child. They take the smile off their face and give it to someone in their group who is looking very sad. Keep passing the smile until everyone has smiled. Then the group stands up except for one child who remains sitting and then they pass 'sitting down' around the rest of the group. With younger children, sit with the group to initiate the opposites that are going to be passed.
