Children create understanding and knowledge of their world by interacting with the environment and the ‘things’ within it. While they are doing this, we often observe them repeating actions over and over again and see repeated patterns in their play.

In the first half of the 20th century, Jean Piaget recognized organized patterns of behaviour in children’s play and developed his schema theory around how children learn and acquire knowledge through physical and mental actions. In the 1980’s Chris Athey furthered Piaget’s work by identifying clusters of play patterns and developed the concept of schematic play or schema play.

The third and final session in this series will focus on Emotional Schemas. Educators will have an opportunity to dive deeply into the concept of emotional schemas in an early learning and child care setting. This will include identifying and recognizing emotional play schemas, and how educators can support young children with the development of self-regulation through emotional play schemas.