Play Schemas: What Your Toddler Is Actually Doing When She Does the Same Thing Fifty Times

My youngest once spent two hours on a tile floor in Costa Rica lining up colored pencils and sorting them by color, and if I’d walked over and asked her to draw something with them, I’d have ruined it.

She wasn’t drawing. She wasn’t playing in any way an adult would recognize as play. She was working, with total concentration, on something that looked like nothing, and I knew what it was because I’d watched her three older siblings do versions of it, and because there’s a name for it. Educators call it a schema, and once you can see schemas you stop asking your toddler to do something “useful” with the pencils and start getting out of her way.

What are play schemas?

A play schema is a pattern of behavior a young child repeats, over and over, across different materials and situations, because she’s working out one idea about how the world operates. The idea comes from Jean Piaget, who used “schema” to mean the mental structure a child builds by acting on the world and adjusting when the world doesn’t behave as expected. The specific application to play was worked out by a British educator named Chris Athey, who ran the Froebel Early Education Project in London from 1973 to 1978, following twenty children and their parents closely and recording what the children did. Her 1990 book, Extending Thought in Young Children, is where the early-years world got its list, and her definition is the one to keep: a schema is a repeated pattern of behavior that a child uses to find what’s common across her experiences.

What that means in a kitchen is this. A toddler who drops her spoon off the high chair thirty times is not being difficult; she’s running an experiment on what happens when things leave her hand, and she needs thirty trials because that’s how you establish a result. (Every one of my four did it, and I’ve written about why here.) A toddler who lines up every car in the house is working on order and sequence. A toddler who fills a bucket, dumps it, and fills it again for an hour is working on capacity and quantity and the shocking fact that the same stuff takes up a different shape in a different container. None of it is random, and none of it is a phase to get through. It’s the curriculum, written by the child.

The types of play schemas (in prose)

The lists online run to eight or nine, and the names vary, but these are the ones you’ll actually see.

Trajectory is anything about things moving through space: dropping, throwing, kicking, pouring from a height, running back and forth, watching water run. This is the first one most babies show and the one most likely to get a child in trouble, because throwing is throwing whether it’s a ball or a plate.

Transporting is carrying things from one place to another, in hands, pockets, bags, buckets, a dump truck, and then carrying them back. If your two-year-old moves every block in the house into the bathroom one at a time, that’s this.

Enveloping and enclosing are wrapping things up (dolls in blankets, herself in a sheet, a toy in forty layers of paper) and building boundaries around things (fences around animals, a circle of blocks, a fort). Positioning is lining up, ordering, arranging, putting things in rows and sorting them by color or size, and my daughter’s two hours of pencils is this schema at full strength.

Rotation is anything that turns: wheels, spinning herself in circles, stirring, watching the washing machine, drawing circles. Connecting (and its evil twin, disconnecting) is joining things together, train tracks, tape, string, holding hands, and then taking them apart, which is why a tower gets knocked down the moment it’s finished. Orientation is seeing things from a different angle: hanging upside down off the couch, looking through her legs, climbing to see from up high. And transforming is mixing, changing, combining: mud and water, paint colors, sand and juice, which is a large part of what a mud kitchen is for.

A child can run more than one at a time, and the same child will cycle through several across a year. They’re not a diagnosis and they’re not a test; they’re a way of seeing.

Play schemas by age

Since people search for it: trajectory shows up first, in the first year, with the dropping and throwing. Transporting and rotation are everywhere in the second year, once a child can walk and carry. Positioning, enclosing, enveloping and connecting get strong between two and four, as fine motor skills catch up to the ideas. Transforming runs from the first fistful of food to well past preschool. But I’d hold all of that loosely, because my four didn’t do them in the same order or at the same ages, and the age chart matters far less than noticing what yours is working on this week.

Why adults wreck it

I taught high school, so my professional experience with schemas is at the far end: fifteen-year-olds who had lost the capacity to work at anything for its own sake, and I think a lot of that loss starts here, at two, when the repetition gets interrupted. A toddler lining up pencils looks, to a busy adult, like a toddler not doing anything, and the adult’s reflex is to redirect her into something that produces a result: draw a picture, build a tower, come do this puzzle. Every redirection teaches her that her own investigation is less valuable than the adult’s idea of what play should look like. Do that daily for five years and you get a child who waits to be told what to do.

The other way adults wreck it is by seeing the schema as a problem to manage. The throwing becomes a behavior issue instead of a trajectory schema that needs balls and a yard. The dumping becomes a mess instead of a capacity schema that needs a bin of rice and a cup. The mixing becomes “stop that” instead of a transforming schema that needs a mud kitchen. The behavior is the need. Give the need somewhere to go and the behavior stops being a problem, usually that same afternoon.

That’s the systems layer, and the blame lands on a culture that has decided young children should be producing visible output, the craft, the worksheet, the thing for the fridge, when the real work of a two-year-old is invisible and repetitive and looks like nothing.

What to do with it

Watch for a week before you do anything. Notice what she does over and over, and name the schema to yourself. Then feed it: a trajectory kid needs things she’s allowed to throw and a place to throw them; a transporting kid needs bags and buckets and a destination; a positioning kid needs lots of small things that are alike and a flat surface and no interruption; a transforming kid needs a mud kitchen or a bin of something messy. (The loose parts essay is basically a shopping list for schemas, and it costs nothing.) Then leave. The repetition needs time, and time needs you to not be in it; I’ve written about that here.

And when the pencils are lined up on the floor for the fiftieth time, step over them.

One thing

For the next three days, write down one thing your toddler does more than five times. At the end, look at the list and name what she’s working on. Then find her more of it.

I write every week about what childhood is for and how to protect it from the things built to fill it. You can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Athey C, Extending Thought in Young Children: A Parent-Teacher Partnership (Paul Chapman, 1990; 2nd ed. Sage, 2007). Froebel Early Education Project, 1973–78, twenty children and their parents; schemas as repeated patterns of behaviour. Link
• Piaget J, The Origins of Intelligence in Children (1952) for the concept of schema; see the site’s Piaget essay for his stages of play.