Embracing Schemas

“Thomas tips the basket of pom poms on the floor that you have just picked up for the 10th time in the last 30 minutes, your body sighs involuntary as you turn to assess the mess. You smile at Thomas, as he says “again, again” and begins to eagerly pick up all the items and place them back into the basket. Giving you a cheeky point counting as you throw them back into the basket. Thomas eagerly copies throwing the small pom poms.”

Schemas are repeated patterns of behaviour that children do in their play. These are vital and important to child development and how children make sense of the world. Sometimes schemas are the things that exhaust us, such as a basket being tipped on the floor for the 10th time. Or the things that parents will complain about the most for example, “Joshua just keeps throwing toys” or “Sophie has to line all the toys up before we can play with them!” The thing is the more we try to squash a child’s schema, not only is it nearly impossible for that child, but also the more likely we are going to see them exhibit those behaviours.

What we can do though is we can embrace these wonderful schemas of children. We can plan for those individual learning needs, embracing the holistic child and everything we know about them. Planning isn’t just that matching everything carefully to a learning objective from development matters or birth to five matters. (Which remember is not meant to be a tick list!).

So, let’s think about our Thomas a little bit more. What do we know about Thomas?

“Thomas regularly goes to the park with his parents, and they say how he particularly likes climbing up the stairs to the slide and going down. And shows little interest in the other apparatus at the park such as the tunnels, or balance toys.  He also quite often likes to sit at the top of the stairs by the stair gate and post his toys down the stairs through the stair gate. At nursery you have noticed that Thomas will spend lots of time tipping boxes out and watching the items fall. He also loves to draw and will draw straight vertical and horizontal lines across the piece of paper.”

This suggests that Thomas is learning through play in the trajectory schema this is showing an interest in the movement of himself and items and often throw toys. So, what possible things could you do or set up within your environment to support Thomas in his learning and development?

Coloured chick peas and cardboard tubes a great activity for exploring the trajectory schema.

1.       Explore ramps and gradients with the toy cars, trucks and trains.

2.       Have soft items that he can throw and explore the trajectory of, for example, fabric squares, pom poms, soft balls, feathers.

3.       Target games with bean bags where you can introduce shape recognition and number recognition.

4.       Playing with scarfs and ribbons on a windy day.

5.       Using gross motor skills to walk and move along vertical and horizontal lines.

6.       Mark making with cars.

7.       Lots of mark-making opportunities using different medians, e.g., chalk, pencils, crayons, pens or charcoal.

8.       Making kites and playing with them on a windy day.

9.       Have different size cardboard tubes for children to post objects through, for example, rice, chickpeas, pom poms.

10.   Opportunities to climb on apparatus.

These are simple activities or extensions that you can have within your enabling environment to support and embrace the schema that Thomas is currently in.

To find out more about the Trajectory schema, why not book on our webinar ‘Focus on the Trajectory Schema’? Or if you want to just have a general understanding of schemas, why not download our recorded webinar, ‘Again, Again, Again: Schema’s in the Early Years’?