Maybe you will find that children will go up and down repeatedly and walk back and forth tirelessly.
Did you find the child? When children play with building blocks, they always set the building blocks high and then push them down, and then set them high and then push them down.
Behind these behaviors, what we seem to repeat is the child's stubbornness or why?
When babies and toddlers walk around, we can observe that they frequently explore specific thinking patterns and action patterns, such as going in and out, walking around or constantly rotating. There is potential logic in their game. Those seemingly strange and even mischievous games can also let us discover the schema that exists in them.
-Julia Manning Morton and Maggie Thorpe
Julia Manning-Morton & Maggie Thorpe)
The word "schema" is usually used to describe repetitive behavior patterns, which appear in babies' games and exploration activities and are the way for babies to explore and express their developing ideas and thinking.
This kind of repetitive action helps babies to establish an internal cognitive structure-schema in their brains, which helps babies to construct the meaning of what they do. Parents and early educators can understand the ideas and concepts they are exploring by observing the schema in baby games.
The importance of games and schemata in infants' learning and development is emphasized in the basic stage of British infants. It advocates hands-on operation, mainly games, and comes from the results of pedagogy theory and related empirical research. In these studies, infants are considered as active learners who learn through games.
? Look at some of the most common patterns for children in children's games and cables.
Trajectory: I like to throw things down from a high chair or crib, or climb up and down.
Spinning: I am fascinated by spinning, including playing with toys with wheels, wandering in autumn or riding a wooden horse on the lake.
Enclosure: Frame your own pictures and enclose them with building blocks, such as fence animals.
Packaging: to completely cover, wrap or put oneself or articles in a bag.
Handling: moving from one place to another by yourself, such as taking things for adults, or carrying things back and forth in bags and containers.
Connection: for example, connecting or disassembling the tracks of toy trains, using building materials, and sticking the materials together with glue or tape.
Positioning: I like to arrange toy cars, books and shoes in a row. Or group them.
Orientation: I like to pose in different places, such as handstand, sideways, etc. Or put things in different places.
Day after day, with the accumulation of experience, the schema will become more and more detailed.
Babies and young children are constantly trying to understand the world around them. They integrate their existing knowledge, understanding and experience into new situations through games, explorations and repetitive schema behaviors. Babies solve problems, try and make mistakes, make decisions and make choices based on known experience. This kind of learning from personal practice is the best learning.
It is important for us to realize that children's play does not happen randomly or accidentally, but collects information in a systematic and logical way through perception and movement in interaction with others, materials and environment. Knowing and understanding schema is helpful for educators to support and challenge children's thinking, ideas and development concepts. When educators know and recognize the schema game mode, they can keep up with the thinking of infants and children, really be interested in what children are doing, provide support for infants and children, help them to sort out their ideas (concepts), and then ask open questions.
Schema has biological characteristics, and we are born with the ability and desire to use and form schema, which is very important for babies' learning and development. Babies' schemata are influenced by their genes and their experience of people and things. It may be a reflex behavior for a 2-year-old child to grasp soft objects, such as plasticine. However, with the repetition of actions, their experience of plasticine in psychological map and cognitive structure will change imperceptibly and become more purposeful, mature and rich. Every time a baby plays with plasticine, that is, revisiting its existing schema, he will have a deeper understanding of plasticine. As children assimilate their experiences into existing schemata, their schemata will become more complicated, and they will also adjust their existing schemata to adapt to new experiences.
-Julia Manning Morton and Maggie Thorpe
Schema has social and cultural characteristics. People we contact, early life experiences, living environment, culture and code of conduct, personal growth and physical development will all affect our learning and development.
How the brain develops depends on the complex interaction between the genes you are born with and the experiences you have.
-Rima Coast
Although babies may not always show schema behavior or use schema, they can still see schema in their exploration and interaction with the world. Children may abandon a schema, repeat the previous schema, or have no schema behavior for a period of time. When children encounter new challenges, experiences, resources and materials, they can use schema to guide themselves to ask questions, predict, imagine and reason. As time goes on, the schema will become more complex and detailed, and children may display more than one schema at a time.
Babies will perceive movement, sound, texture, light patterns, tastes and smells when they are exercising and playing. These emotional sports experiences will become a psychological activity,
Infants and young children may also use schemas to help them deal with emotions and emotions. We have observed that babies who are interested in similar schemas may play together, and they may also use different schemas in different situations and families.
Kathy Natbrown
Schema observation provides another way for early educators to think about the development of babies according to their current interests. This enables them to provide appropriate activities for their babies at the right time, which helps them to explore their concerns as much as possible, get enough learning opportunities and get satisfaction.
Learn more about how babies learn;
Observe and identify the current schema of the baby;
Make appropriate plans to support the development of the model;
Adopt the learning style preferred by infants;
Support and challenge the thinking of infants.
The relationship among play, development and schema is not accidental, among which schema is the core of children's learning. The schema-driven way for infants in games is very powerful and has a clear purpose, which parents and early educators can't ignore.
Parents and teachers should "encourage the independence of infants." When infants and young children explore a specific exercise pattern, this exercise pattern is sometimes their schema. "
How do children learn by using schema games
Infants and young children learn through personal experience. They use repetitive activities to help them practice, remember and organize their ideas, and connect their experiences with previous experiences. The following is a description of the complexity of schema game development.
Horizontal 1: Perceive a motion.
Infants and young children learn through the information obtained by movements, movements and five senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste). These early sensory experiences and exercises are very important for children.
Learning and development are very important.
At home or nursery, parents and early childhood educators can learn according to their children's schema:
Move by climbing, dragging or rolling.
Enjoy the feeling of painting in wet sand, coarse paste or pigment.
Explore objects in different ways, such as shaking, bumping, staring, touching, tasting, mumbling, pulling, rotating and poking. (
The behavior of painting is different from that of writing. It's just a sensory experience of infants, not a communication symbol.
Use a series of media, through perception, into exploration and experiment.
The second layer: symbolic representation
When children use one object to represent another, we can observe the symbolic representation.
Gradually be able to play pretend games with toys. My Dabao likes to make ice cream with plasticine and then pretend to taste it with a small spoon. He is also willing to share his cooking with his family.
Support children's symbolic games and realize that pretending to do something can help children express their feelings. This is a very good activity to cultivate children's imagination.
In the pretend game, it is assumed that one item represents other items in the game. For example, during the bath time, my baby will use bathroom toys such as fish as tickets and the round switch button in the bathtub as the steering wheel of the car. Sing the song "Wheels on the Bus". Think of the whole bathtub as a bus, and I am the driver who sells tickets and drives.
The third level: functional dependence or causality
Functional dependence means that children apply existing knowledge to new situations, which requires children to use absorbed and assimilated knowledge in their own practice.
Examples of functional dependency or causality:
The understanding of technology begins with the baby's exploration and perception of things and their interaction with things. (20 12:p.4 1)
Promote children's understanding of grouping and causality.
Know that objects can have different uses, for example, balls can be used for rolling or throwing, and toy cars can be pushed.
Understand that some things exist even though they are invisible.
Understand that when some items are added or reduced, the number of items in a group will change.
The fourth layer: abstract thinking
Abstract thinking means that children begin to realize what they already have and can describe events, things or experiences in words. The revised "Early Childhood Basic Stage" (20 12) points out that at this stage, children can remember and repeat the information obtained before without physical objects. In this way, children prove that they have absorbed, adapted and assimilated knowledge, and then they can use this knowledge to generate new ideas when talking about things they are interested in. Examples of abstract thinking: using language as a powerful tool to expand the scope of communication and share feelings, experiences and ideas.
Retell a little thing that happened in the right word order (for example, I slipped down the slide and hurt my finger).
By recalling and revisiting past experiences, we can explain what is happening, predict what may happen next, and connect language with thoughts.
Chris Asi (2007) and Tina Bruce (20 1 1) suggest that children should be able to realize the importance of using schema in various situations and at different levels of development. They suggest that teachers need to find out the behavior patterns of children in the whole game. After in-depth research, they think it will help teachers to understand children's current interests and ideas more deeply. Similar to them, Cathy Nat Brown (2011) also suggested that teachers must provide educational content that matches children's thinking and abilities.
The position of these experts is very clear. They all call for teaching and learning strategies in early education to be centered on children's learning style. In this way, teachers can better connect children's ideas and interests with the course content. When children use their schemata at different development levels and periods, parents and teachers should use their knowledge about schemata as a tool to support and develop children's thinking, so that their thinking and ideas can be seen. Teachers strive to provide children with open resources and materials as a starting point for their discovery and exploration, which will help promote the development of teachers' professional ability. Teachers should also observe how children discover and explore what they are interested in, find ways for children to symbolically express their experiences and show their learning attitude. Once mastering this knowledge, teachers can be more aware of children's motivation level, participation, persistence and concentration when doing things they are interested in.
"Development is important" further emphasizes the above suggestions in the section "Characteristics of effective learning". For example, exploratory learning-playing games on the basis of existing experience-focuses on symbolic representation, and the "creative and critical thinking" section also emphasizes the importance of children verifying their ideas through practice. Teachers are encouraged to provide opportunities for children to practice and improve their skills in a meaningful and relevant environment. Teachers should pay attention to the schema development level of each child. This is a method that really meets children's interests and can support their actual thoughts. When evaluating children's current level of schema games, teachers can observe in the following activities:
Collect-pile things together at will.
Handling-moving items from one place to another.
Positioning-Place items in a specific location.
Sorting—Sorts items by size.
Orientation-rotate the object, turn around by yourself, turn the object upside down, and stand upside down by yourself.
Trajectory (horizontal and vertical)-climb, throw, kick and run.
Tilt (uncoordinated trajectory)-slope, slide, ramp.
Enclosure-build fences and roadblocks, full or empty in the middle.
Package packaging, covering space, goods and yourself.
Rotation and semicircle-interested in rotating objects and exploring curves.
Join and explode-Join and explode projects.
Change materials by mixing, covering and decorating.
Match-in a one-to-one way, such as cups and saucers.
It should be noted that despite the recent revision of Development is Important, the original Practical Guidance Material (2008) can still be used as a supplementary material to support educational practice, and the main viewpoints and principles of the original document remain unchanged, namely, positive relationship, favorable environment, unique children and learning and development. The "Characteristics of Effective Learning" part of the revised Basic Stage for Children (20 12) emphasizes how children learn, not what they learn. Many of its features are extracted from Principles of Children's Basic Stage (2008) and applied to exercise cards (4. 1 games and exploration, 4.2 active learning, 4.3 creative and critical thinking). The exploration process is applied to objects and events.
-Gillian Roden
The important role of teachers is to observe children so that they can:
Discover children's interests and schemata;
Determine the development stage of children;
Determine the learning style that children like;
. Make plans for all areas of study and experience that do not necessarily happen every day.
The more teachers know about each child, the more effectively they can choose the appropriate course content for one or more children.
Chris assi
As an observation record, the teacher should write down what he saw and heard, not what he thought. Not every detail needs to be recorded, but attention should be paid to describing the baby's nonverbal communication and recording their related words. Teachers should wait until the observation is completed before asking themselves: "What are the important, meaningful, new or different things in children's learning and development?"
Observation enables teachers to:
Understand and attach importance to the learning and development of infants;
Respect children's unique differences;
On the basis of existing experience, expand children's interest in language and thinking;
Plan dynamic, challenging and interactive games to support and expand children's thinking;
Cooperate with parents, caregivers and other professionals.
Parents and teachers need to understand that parents and teachers themselves and the learning environment play a key role in supporting and expanding the learning and development of babies. For example, when a child tries to draw his hands and fingers, he needs a teacher to support his study and provide a series of other materials that can be used to draw his hands and objects. Learning environment has a great influence on children's development, because the environment will "talk" to children, and children will explain what the "environment" said.
The stimulating environment is conducive to the generation of schema and can provide sufficient resources for children's schema games. Therefore, parents and teachers should not only provide a good exploration environment, but also give physical and mental support and encouragement.