Leong Min Zhi, May (Group B)

Case 1 –Communication and social skills

(i) the intervention - Multicomponent intervention in Play

This play intervention uses 3 components to increase social communication between children. Children will first plan their play together with an adult on a play theme to facilitate their play. Next, children will play independently using conversational interaction. The adult will be at the side observing and facilitating when needed. The adult will model and prompt the child to sustain the play between the children. Lastly, children will evaluate their play interaction with their peers and evaluate own contributions and feelings towards the play.

The article states that this intervention includes 2 main focus, adult mediated strategies and peer-mediated strategies. The adult needs to plan high interest activities to engage the child with limited social communication skills in play activities with peers. This allows the child to enhance the social bonding with peers and at the same time, enhance the child’s communication opportunities with the peers. The adult needs to provide responses and prompts to the child too when the child has a lack of vocabulary to describe his/her thoughts and feelings. Thus, the adult will model his/her language and teach new behavior so that the child can learn the appropriate words for interaction. For the peer mediated strategy, the child will do different kinds of play with peers to interact, model and learn from the each other.

(ii) its effectiveness (as reported in the journal article)

The study shows that after the intervention, there is an increase in the children’s descriptive utterance and request among them. The children are able to use different words to describe things, verbalize their thoughts and feelings. In the process, teacher’s guidance of redirection, direction and prompts are essential to enable the child to continue the play process and find the right words to describe his/her thoughts. The children are also seen to be using an increase number of different words. The play is more interactive and peer directed and they are able to work well together. Minimal negative behavior was seen. The children were able to share ideas and engage in communication.

(iii) your personal evaluation how the child will benefit from this intervention

Annie is an academically normal developing child but she has speech impairment due to her facial deformities at birth, which result in her negative social behavior as she was shy to verbalize her feelings. I think this way of reaction is normal for the child as she may lack confidence in herself and yet do not know the right way to communicate. Thus, the lack of communication skills was lead to behavior and social difficulties. I feel that with this intervention, Annie and her peers will have the chance to interact with each other and get to know each other more. The peers need to know that she is no different from any other children and Annie need to learn to use simple words to show her feelings instead of hurting action. This play intervention allows Annie to work together with her peers and I think that it is an effective way to foster peer acceptance and friendship. Annie will be able to learn to verbalize her thoughts and feelings to her peers during the play. Both teacher and peer support in class is very important for the child’s growth. Teacher need to take on the important role of guidance for the children too. With that, the children will understand why Annie has this problem and come out with ways to help her instead of teasing at her.


(iv) your suggestions how you can make adjustments to cater to the needs of the
child and to facilitate integration of the child / the intervention activity into
your classroom.

Instead of using dramatic play, I may adapt it to a role play or drama session for the 6 years old. I will first plan the play by come out with a social story similar to Annie’s together with the children and get the children, including Annie to be in the play. I will get the children to think, share and empathize with the child who is being teased at and ask them how they will react to it, or what are the possible ways to react. I will prompt the children to think whether the action is right or not and what is the solution to the problem. Next, the children will practice and form the drama on their own with me guiding at a side. They will need to interact and share ideas with one another on how they should act. Annie may use other alternative to verbalize her thoughts like using response whiteboard to elaborate her points if she is unable to say the word. After the play, the children will debrief on the play and say how they feel about the play and their interactions with the friends. I think this will increase the interaction among the peers to let them know each other better and develop the confidence for Annie to speak out or write out her feelings.

Reference:
Craig-Unkefer, L. A., & Kaiser, A. P. (2002). Improving the social communication skills of at-risk preschool children in a play context. Topics in Early Childhood special education, 22(1), 3-13. Retrieved September 6, 2009, from EBSCOhost Child Development & Adolescent Studies: http://ezproxy.wheelock.edu:2239/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=3&sid=1a4083c7-47ee-464e-8e9b-2612b6099c26%40sessionmgr4&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=fgh&AN=6463966