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.

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0020 Schema Play Basics

Episode Notes

Schema Play Theory

Transforming Schema

Filling And Emptying Schema

Going Through Schema

Back And Forth Schema

Orientation Schema

Enveloping Schema

Transporting Schema

Positioning Schema

Rotation Schema

Enclosing Schema

Connecting Schema

Scattering Schema

Trajectory Schema

The Schema Play Basics Transcript

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.