Parts of a Set

A child’s desire for set completion can be a sharing arrangement instead of a sharing obstacle.

Learning Seeds Engagement Strategies

Comic Strip by Cynthia Yuan Cheng

Challenging Moment: A child struggles to share objects because they want to hoard all of the objects in a particular group or set.

A Strategy to Try: Parts of a Set

It is natural for children — as well as adults — to have a compulsion toward set completion. But when an activity is to be shared, collecting “all” of something can be made to mean “all of the blue ones” or “all of the green ones”. A child can be offered a choice: “Which part of the set would you like all of? Do you want to take all of the blue ones and let your peer have all of the green ones?"

What Happens: The child is given an opportunity to share parts of a common object group — and a common activity — with a peer, while maintaining the sought-after satisfaction of having a complete set of objects.