What are the Schemas

Humans are innate scientists. From early toddlerhood, children experience natural, uncontrollable and very necessary developmental urges known as Schemas. These are repetitive actions that help us to construct meaning. They explain why children throw their food, climb everything in sight, or resist wearing clothes. Even adults explore schemas, but usually in a less obvious way than children.

Every time you perform a task, you're using your knowledge of a schema. Cooking, using an escalator, typing on a computer or driving the car. You couldn't do these things without a solid foundation of schema exploration throughout your life. You might not have made this dish before, but you've made something similar and you know roughly what ingredients go together, how to chop the vegetables and how long to cook the pasta. You even know that a little cinnamon in a tomato dish really brings out the flavour. Sometimes you add too much chilli and end up ordering in. A little trial and error makes life interesting!

Our schemas are constantly being updated by our interactions with our environment. As we explore different things, we realise we have gaps in our knowledge and we work to fill them. Children especially are always asking the questions "what does this do? what happens if I..."

You already know that to get dressed you have to put your arms and legs through the holes, choose weather appropriate gear, zip zippers, button buttons and tie laces. Toddlers and children work towards this goal by exploring how it feels to wear no clothes, wear dress up clothes, wrap themselves in different materials, push their heads or hands or bodies through different spaces, line up train tracks, connect legos together... the list goes on.

Sometimes children will spend a while on one particular schema. Sometimes they will work on a couple at a time, and sometimes it seems like they are trying to understand them all at once.

At Discovery Time, we fully endorse the exploration of each schema, no matter how annoying it might seem to the adult mind. Yes, sometimes this will look like children are not using the materials in the way that they are made to be used, or the way you hoped they would. But we expect this, and in fact encourage it.

Click on each schema below to find out more about them, as well as how they can be developed at Discovery Time.

Trajectory

Positioning

Connecting

Transporting

Orientation

Enveloping

Enclosing

Rotation