Schemas

Have your keys ever gone missing? Or perhaps your phone? You were sure you put them down on the coffee table but suddenly they were gone. Cue an hour of increasingly frantic searching. Where could they be? Things don’t just disappear. So you go to your computer and log in to ‘Find my iPhone’. Ping! Ping! […]

Lie on the floor. Yes, down there. Do it now. Lie down on your tummy. All the way down, with your chin on the ground. What does the world look like from there? Now take a toy – a plastic figure or a car. Move it around in front of you. It feels like you’re

What is a schema? Schema play is how our children learn to make sense of the world. A schema (also known as a play schema) is like a set of instructions. As adults we use them all the time, and we don’t really notice we’re doing it. Switch on a light or make a sandwich

A toddler stands in front of the washing machine, watching it go round. And around. Later he takes a crayon and draws jerky spirals on paper. He also runs round and round a tree in the garden and spends a long time pushing his wooden train around the track. These are all physical manifestations of

Here is a girl. She is lining up beans along the windowsill. One, then another, then another. All in a row, evenly spaced out. She didn’t start out with this arrangement in mind. She simply put one bean down and then another. Something about the configuration looked right. The line travelling in the same direction

From A to B. It’s such a simple idea. You can go by yourself. Or you can take something with you. This concept is known as the transportation schema. Schemas are mental models of how we think the world works. Your transportation schema is a representation in your mind of what happens when an object

Here is a boy. He is rolling a ball along a track and it is fun. Down, down, it rolls, snaking left and right until it reaches the bottom. But the game doesn’t stop there. Back to the start it goes and the ball sets off again. How many times does he do this? He

Your baby sits at a basket. She is holding a toy. She tries to put the toy inside. Will it fit? She doesn’t know. A squash and a squeeze. A twist and a shove. A furrowed brow. All of a sudden, with a final push, it drops in. Success! A few months later, now a

Up, up, up. Your child is building a tower, one block at a time. Higher and higher she goes, the delight evident on her face as she meets each new challenge. It’s now so tall she can’t add any more blocks. So what next? Crash! Cue squeals of laughter. Down it all tumbles, the tower

Your child is painting a picture. She mixes some paint, pouring red into yellow. As she swirls her brush the colours combine. At first, the colours form discrete streaks but they soon interminigle and she has a beautiful pot of vibrant orange. But something is going on. The paint is not transferred to the page.