An Educators Guide To Children’s Schema In Early Childhood

As an early childhood educator, have you ever noticed a child endlessly filling containers or obsessively lining up objects? These behaviours likely reflect "schemas" - patterns of repeated actions that reveal how a child engages with the world. 

Understanding and supporting play schemas can transform your teaching by providing unique windows into each child's strengths, interests, and approaches to learning. 

Understanding Recurring Patterns Of Play In Early Childhood

It can help to think of schemas as play patterns - the 'language' young children use to express their thoughts, ideas, and understanding of the world around them. These patterns or 'schemas' are recurring behaviours that are unique to each child, yet share common themes across all children. 

Whether it's a fascination with lining up toy cars or an obsession with pouring water from one container to another, these are all play patterns - a child's way of exploring, learning, and making sense of their world.

The Role and Significance of Play Patterns in Early Education

Play patterns are not just about keeping children busy. They're an integral part of childhood development. When children engage in these behaviours, they're testing theories, learning cause and effect, and developing foundational skills that are crucial for their later learning. 

Understanding these patterns allows us, as early childhood educators, to 'speak' the same language as the children, helping us connect with them on a deeper level.

The Importance of Understanding Play Patterns in Early Childhood Education

Why should we, as educators, understand these patterns? Because they provide a window into a child's mind. 

They help us understand what a child is interested in, how they're thinking, and what skills they're developing. This knowledge is invaluable when planning learning experiences, as it allows us to tailor our teaching to support each child's unique learning journey.

The Benefits of Supporting Play Patterns in Early Learning Settings

When you provide opportunities for children to explore their play patterns in your early learning setting, you're doing more than just setting up an activity. You're creating a rich, engaging environment where children feel understood and supported in their learning.

Let's take the example of a child who shows interest in the 'connecting' schema. They might spend their time linking toy trains, sticking blocks together, or fastening and unfastening buttons on a dress-up costume. 

By recognising this pattern, you can provide materials and experiences that support this interest, such as building sets, threading activities, or dressing up clothes with various fastenings.

In doing so, you're not only supporting the child's current interest, but you're also helping them develop important skills such as fine motor coordination, problem-solving, and persistence

By supporting schemas, we provide opportunities to develop skills such as:

• Cause and effect
• Spatial awareness 
• Motor coordination
• Problem solving
• Persistence
• Creativity
• Language and social interaction

Schemas offer windows into child development that complement our knowledge of stages, milestones, and domains. 

How are schemas different from developmental milestones?

This is a question I am often asked when this topic comes up in my workshops so let's clarify that for you now before we move on!

Milestones represent broad skills most children acquire by certain ages (walking, classifying objects, etc.).

Schemas reveal more nuanced insights that make each child unique - their motivations, strengths, and inclinations. Schemas operate within and across standard developmental stages and domains.

So while milestones provide overview snapshots, schemas offer focused insights to directly inform intentional teaching.

Spotlight on Schemas

There are numerous schemas ranging from positioning to transporting. Observe play closely to uncover the particular schema behaviour driving an individual child’s actions.

Let’s explore some common schema categories in more detail:

Enclosure play builds spatial awareness, problem-solving skills and supports emotional security. 

Trajectory Schema

Children intrigued by the trajectory schema experiment with motions and speeds. They may:

• Roll cars down ramps 
• Toss balls 
• Blow objects along a surface
• Enjoy swinging, sliding, or merry-go-rounds

Trajectory play nurtures understanding of cause-and-effect, estimation, and positional vocabulary.

Transformative play promotes flexibility, creativity, and understanding of properties.

Transporting play allows exploration of motion, strengthens coordination and activates imagination.

Connecting play develops fine motor skills, comprehension of part-whole relationships and curiosity.

Observing and Interpreting Schemas: A Guide to Meaningful Insights for Educators...

Understanding schemas begins with keen observation and interpretation so I've put together a roadmap to help you work your way through this process meaningfully.

Looking for Schema Patterns...

Interpreting Schema Patterns

Supporting Schemas...

Schema Documentation Tips...

By now, you're probably realising that understanding and supporting play schemas can genuinely enrich your early education planning and practice. Recognising these patterns supports not just your documentation and planning but also makes the child's exploration of the world around them more meaningful.

But let's address the metaphorical 'elephant in the room' shall we—keeping up with all this observational work and planning is often overwhelming, especially when you're already swamped with other responsibilities. Wouldn't it be great if there was a simpler, yet effective way to navigate this?

Well, there is! In Part 2 of this series, I'll share with you how using AI tools like ChatGPT as an educational assistant can simplify and enrich your approach to understanding and supporting children's play schemas. Coming soon!