Nursery World - EYFS best practice: All about… schematic learning

Understanding children’s schemas, or ‘patterns of behaviour and thinking’, enables practitioners to support them as they use them to deepen their learning, explain Professor Tina Bruce CBE, Dr Stella Louis and Dr Carole Bloch

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One of the important challenges for early childhood educationalists is how to explain what significant learning is taking place as babies and young children interact with the people and materials in their setting. What often appear as random explorations can be understood by uncovering repeated behaviours, or ‘schemas’.

These are described as ‘patterns of behaviour and thinking in children that exist underneath the surface features of various contents, contexts and specific experiences’ (Athey 2007). Parents, carers, teachers and researchers familiar with schemas observe children engaging in repeated patterns of trajectory, rotating, enclosing, enveloping, connecting, transporting, orienting, etc.

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