PHQP 0020 Schema Play Basics – Jeff explores the fundamentals of schema play, rooted in Piaget’s cognitive development theory, highlighting how children’s repeated behavior patterns, like throwing or enclosing, reflect an innate curiosity that drives learning, physical development, and sensory integration, and offers practical ways adults can support these behaviors by creating play-friendly environments with open-ended materials.

Watch Now: PHQP_0020 Schema Play Basics

Welcome to Playvolution HQ Podcast, I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on the show. So I’ve really been overjoyed, I guess is the word, happy.

Pulled out of my normal stupor of disdain for life. No, that sounds too serious. No, there’s been a lot of kids outside playing in the neighborhood lately.

And about a year ago, there was a lot of kids outside playing in the neighborhood. And then like the three kids that apparently initiated all the outdoor play moved. And now it’s back up again.

I was taking the dogs out for a walk the other day and I kind of counted on our short walk through the neighborhood. We passed, I think it was like a group of 14 kids all running around playing some sort of tag game that they’d invented. And there were bikes all over the places and they’re left and not stolen.

And there are balls and bats out and there’s kids climbing trees and building swings with found objects and all kinds of chaos. And it’s delightful and it’s good to see because there’s so much value in that kind of outdoor play. And for a long time, I didn’t see a lot of it.

And I don’t know if it’s just a pocket of it here in my corner of the world or if it’s going on other places. If you’re seeing more kids outside being kids the way me and my cohort did back in the 70s and 80s, I’d love to hear about it. So let’s get into other things.

Topic one, only again, only one topic for this week. Schema play basics. So we’re gonna kind of delve into an overview of schema play, I guess.

And then in future episodes, I want to probably dig into some individual play schema and go into them in more detail with more examples and those kinds of things. So let’s get started on this. So schema play theory is rooted in PSJA’s cognitive development theory as a starter point.

So that’s where it’s philosophical slash research basis is. That’s where it’s thought origins are, I guess. And what a play schema is, is a repeated behavior pattern in children’s play.

So it’s something you see kids doing over and over again. Maybe exactly the same way, maybe different ways. Maybe you observe the same activity in different locations.

Maybe there are different variations of the gauge in it. These are usually things children are kind of driven to repeat because they benefit from them in some way. And we can dig into that a little bit deeper.

So they’re driven by this internal curiosity to do these things. And that drive seems to be kind of an innate thing. Nobody teaches them this drive.

They just do it. And as we get into this, you’ll notice that there are some things kids just tend to be interested in at certain stages in their development. Not all kids all the time, but lots of kids lots of the time.

And we’ll dig into a couple of these in a minute. So there’s this curiosity and it seems to be kind of inborn. I would call it, I’d describe it as an evolutionary strategy for figuring out the world.

It’s what a lot of schema is. A evolutionary strategy for knowing, an evolutionary strategy for figuring things out, for exploring. And so they’re driven by this internal curiosity.

And it supports learning. There’s a lot of cognitive stuff going on here. They’re learning a lot about, as we’ll see when we get into some examples, schema play helps kids learn a lot about just the realities of the physical world.

There’s language learning going on. There’s lots of learning happening when kids are exploring these different schema. This play also supports physical development and sensory integration.

A lot of these involve a lot of movement, a lot of activity. And that’s building the physical body, their physicality, but also wiring those eight primary sensory systems I’ve talked about. I’ve talked about before on this show.

And that’s a huge part of the early learning years is getting the body ready for life. And those sensory systems need to be wired up so we can effectively get information to our brain. And our bodies need to be mastered to a certain extent so we can do things like hold our writing utensils and sit still and walk and do all those kind of important things.

So the exploration of play schema kind of supports all of that. And also supports skill mastery. Things like walking and moving their bodies in different ways and certain physical skills as we’ll maybe get into.

So there’s a lot of learning, a lot of benefit from setting up environments where kids are free to explore the schema that they’re interested in. And then letting that lead to their learning. And that seems to be, it seems to be what a lot of play-based programs are doing whether they’re up to speed about play schema theory or not.

Really one of the biggest ways we can support children in engaging in schema play is to create the kind of environment we create for all kinds of play. Lots of time, space, open-ended materials, read that as loose parts. And an adult who’s supportive of letting things go where they go while maintaining health and safety.

So a couple examples. Trajectory schema play is an interest in the way things move through space. Now those things might be balls or blocks or their bodies.

But it’s an interest in the way things get from one place to the other. So I mentioned that a lot of times kids will explore these things at certain ages. Have you ever met a toddler who likes to throw things? And the answer to that is probably yes.

Toddlers go through this stage where they like to throw things. And so if we’re working in a toddler room, one of the strategies you can use to make that environment supportive of toddlers is to make sure they’ve got safe things to throw. Lots of bean bags and shower loofahs and aluminum foil balls or whatever it is you’ve got and make sure that there’s something they can throw and so that you can redirect them to those materials when they want to throw the things that they’re not supposed to throw, like the hardwood blocks.

If you try to outlaw throwing with a group of kids who are interested in throwing, you’re creating problems for yourself. Because again, these kids are biologically driven to explore the world in this way, throwing things. And if you’re saying no, you can’t do this thing that you feel is biologically necessary, you’re gonna have a hard time enforcing that rule.

So one of the biggest ways we can go about supporting a lot of the schema play is to just saying no to stuff. Quit saying no to stuff. And figure out ways to be supportive of it.

If you can’t say yes, come up with some version of no, but. No, you can’t throw the blocks, but you can throw these bean bags. Some version of that.

So you can say yes to the general idea of trajectory. Now another way they explore trajectory is moving their bodies through space. So lots of running and hopping and jumping and skipping and climbing and all these kind of things going on with kids of certain ages.

And again, when we say no to these things, when we ban them, when we play movement cop, we are really hindering their development. And again, I wanna come back and do a whole episode on trajectory, so I’m not gonna spend any more time on that. But another one is scattering.

Have you ever met a toddler, for example, who likes to walk across the room with a bucket of blocks and then dump it out? Or throw their plate off the table? Or take handfuls of spaghetti and throw them at the dog? This is scattering. I mean, it sounds exactly like it is. Or swoop things off the edge of the table.

This is an exploration. And so what’s going on here is they’re exploring the way those objects react to being dropped or brushed off the table or whatever it is. And that’s giving them a lot of information about how the physical world works.

Because dumping out a bucket of blocks is different than dumping out a bucket of feathers, which is different than dumping out a bucket of bouncy balls. And so there’s a lot of scattering going on with some kids. And again, something we as adults often wanna say no to, but kids can benefit from.

So enclosing is kind of a fun one. Have you ever seen kids in the block area, they’ll do that thing where they’ll put a green plastic dinosaur in the middle of the block area and then they’ll build a wall around it and they’ll take an orange T-Rex and they’ll build walls around it? That’s enclosing. Putting things in other things or building enclosures for things.

And again, this is something a lot of kids are drawn to at certain stages in their development. They don’t just do it. Along those lines, one of the things that I find fascinating is around the time when Piaget was thinking about this stuff another early learning person we don’t hear as much about, Harriet Johnson, was observing kids at block play.

This was the early 20s when she was at work. And she wrote a book about block play and she outlines the seven stages of block play. And in that book she describes certain schema, certain play schema in relation to blocks without making the jump that these activities might go on without other materials.

So she was on the brink of discovering play schema herself but her focus was really on block play. So one of the levels, one of the stages of block play is enclosing where kids sit and they build these enclosures out of blocks. Connecting is another schema and she talks about connecting as one of the stages of block play.

So Harriet was on the cusp of discovering play schema theory as well during her research. So there’s a couple of them. And a link to the episode notes, I’ve got links to 12, I think, schema, play schemas and more details on those.

And we’ll probably end up doing episodes on all of them but apparently there are hundreds of them because it’s just a thing kids like repeated doing. And so if you step back and observe, they might have a play schema for dramatic play. When they go to the dramatic play area they might have a certain way they like to engage in dramatic play.

But really there’s these handful of these we see all the time. And we’ll get into more of them individually in the future but what they do is they help adults understand behavior for one. For me when I started reading about this topic it really was a light bulb moment for me.

It was kind of like a, oh, that’s why they throw things. That’s why they, I know there’s rotation schema. And one of the things kids often do when they’re exploring rotation is they’ll take their tricycles and they’ll turn them upside down and they’ll pedal the wheels and watch that wheel go around.

Or they’ll flip the little toy trucks upside down and spin the wheels. And for me it was like, oh, that’s why they’re doing this thing. But for other behaviors like throwing or running when we step back and see those as, hey, that’s not a child trying to misbehave or defy me.

That’s a child with a biological drive to do this thing. And then maybe we can become a little bit more tolerant of some of those things and look for ways to support them. And then help the kids benefit from them than to automatically shut them down.

So I think that’s a real big benefit in our early learning programs. Another thing understanding play schema does is it helps adults manage play spaces. And so if you’ve got a room full of a dozen preschoolers and you’re trying to have a play-based environment, being observant and aware of what schema kids, schema’s kids seem to be interested in helps you tailor that play space to that exploration.

If they are into trajectory schema, you might wanna have open spaces where they can run, but you might wanna have lots of stuff they can throw. Or maybe you wanna have ramps out where they can roll things down ramps and on and on it goes. So you can, an awareness of the schema interests of kids helps you adjust the play space to best meet those needs.

Now, sometimes you’re gonna get it wrong because they’re gonna come in and they’re gonna be not interested in what they were interested in yesterday. But a lot of times you can tweak the spaces to better meet their needs by being more aware of the schema. Another thing it does is it helps adults make sense of children’s actions.

And again, it’s kind of the same as behaviors, I guess, but knowing that the reason that infant is constantly dropping things off their high chair tray when they’re sitting in the high chair is that they’re not trying to annoy you, it’s that they’re trying to figure out trajectory schema. They like to watch things fall off the high chair tray. Or why they’re always splatting their hands into their food because they like to watch the scattering, that scattering schema exploration.

When we make sense of their actions, we’re just kind of more aware of them as individuals and their developmental stage and those kind of things, I guess is the point I wanted to make with this one. And then I think this is the last one in this group. It helps kids strengthen, helps adults strengthen relationships with children.

Because when we take the time to observe better and see what they’re interested in, and then look for ways to support those interests, it does tend to be a bonding moment. And so you might find that if you’ve got this kid who’s always doing the stuff that annoys you, and then you step back and observe, and you realize, well, these things annoy me, and they’re developmentally beneficial because they’re helping the child understand the world or they’re helping them build their proprioception or whatever it is, and you get more supportive of that, that really does deepen the relationship with that child. And so you can take, with a deeper understanding of schema play theory, I think you can maybe build deeper bonds with kids, but especially the kids you might find the most challenging.

And again, not all of the challenging kids all the time, but some of them, some of the time, that makes the job just a little bit easier. Again, we’ll dig into more of those individual schemas in future episodes. So to wrap things up, there’s lots of schema play resources on the Playvolution HQ website.

I’ve linked to some of them in the episode notes, but there’s more there. I, for example, put together a list of 100 loose parts to support each one of the 12 schema, the 12 common schema play schemas that I’ve talked about. And there’s lots of other stuff there too, and links to other people’s resources.

Amazon idea for this week, I’m sorry, I got through there. Let’s transition over here. Somebody used the link to buy these cool little hooks.

They go in this kind of middle grate and you hang them there. I guess these are picture hanging size, which is pretty cool. You can check those out if you want to support the site over on Amazon and then anything you use, anything you buy when you go through my portal supports the show, supports the podcast.

I got to get back here. We went there too fast. So this is the button I want to click.

I’m getting all flustered. Share the show if you like it, it’s much appreciated. The reason I’m getting flustered is we’re running out of time.

Next week, daily schedules. I’ve got thoughts, dad joke of the week. What did the plate say to the other plate? Dinner’s on me.

This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Back soon with another episode. Thanks for listening.

Bye-bye. See the thing is, you got to keep these episodes under 20 minutes. I promised that when I started the show. It’s one of the straining features of the show.

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