Why Does She Keep Wrapping Everything?
You've watched her do it three times today. First, the dolls were wrapped in scarves. Then the blocks were covered with fabric. Now she's carefully tucking leaves around a rock in the garden.
To an untrained eye, it might look repetitive. Even odd. But to an educator who understands schemas, this child is exploring one of the most fundamental concepts in cognitive development: enclosing.
What Are Schemas?
Schemas are repeated patterns of behaviour that children use to explore and understand the world. First identified by Jean Piaget and later expanded by Chris Athey, schemas represent the building blocks of thinking.
The most commonly observed schemas in early childhood include:
- Transporting. Moving objects from one place to another, like carrying blocks across the room or filling and emptying containers.
- Trajectory. Exploring movement through space through throwing, dropping, rolling, and pouring.
- Enclosing. Surrounding, wrapping, or containing objects and spaces, such as building fences around animals or wrapping toys.
- Rotation. Spinning, turning, and twisting, like watching wheels turn, stirring, or rolling down hills.
- Connecting. Joining things together through train tracks, linking chains, or taping paper together.
- Transforming. Changing the state of materials by mixing colours, adding water to sand, or cooking.
- Positioning. Arranging objects in particular patterns, such as lining up cars or organising by colour.
Why Schemas Matter for Educators
Understanding schemas transforms your practice in three ways:
1. You See the Intelligence Behind the Behaviour
When a child throws food at the table, your first instinct might be frustration. But if you recognise trajectory schema, you see a child exploring how objects move through space. The response shifts from "stop that" to "let's find a better place to explore throwing."
2. You Can Plan Meaningful Provocations
If you notice a child deeply engaged in transporting, you might set up a construction site with wheelbarrows, buckets, and materials to move. You're not imposing a curriculum. You're extending their natural curiosity.
3. You Build Richer Documentation
Schema-informed observations are inherently more insightful. Instead of "Mia played with blocks," you write "Mia demonstrated sustained engagement with enclosing schema, carefully building walls around a group of animals and narrating their safety."
Spotting Schemas in Practice
The key is repeated behaviour across contexts. A single instance of wrapping isn't necessarily a schema. But when a child wraps, encloses, covers, and contains across multiple materials, contexts, and days, you're seeing a schema at work.
Here's a quick observation guide:
- Watch for repetition. The same action with different materials.
- Note the focus. Schema-driven play often shows deep concentration.
- Look across contexts. Does the pattern appear indoors and outdoors, with different children, at different times?
- Track over time. Schemas evolve. Trajectory might start with dropping and progress to constructing ramps.
How Technology Can Help
One of the challenges with schema recognition is that patterns emerge over time. A single observation might not reveal a schema, but three observations over two weeks might show a clear trajectory pattern.
This is where tools like PlayPilot become powerful. When your observations are captured consistently and analysed across time, schema patterns surface automatically, sometimes revealing connections you wouldn't have noticed manually.
The Bigger Picture
Schema theory reminds us of something essential: children are not randomly playing. They are thinking. Every repeated action is an experiment. Every pattern is a hypothesis being tested.
Our job as educators isn't to direct this thinking. It's to notice it, name it, and nurture it.