The Positioning Schema
The positioning schema is a play schema commonly observed in preschool and kindergarten children. Do you have children interested in sorting objects or continuously lining them up? Then you have children developing the positioning play schema.
When you understand this schema and know how to support it in your early childhood classroom, you will be well on your way to harnessing the benefits of hands-on learning through play.
Read on to learn more about this play schema and discover some practical tips and ideas for supporting it in your early years setting.
By understanding and supporting the positioning play schema, you will be able to build important cognitive skills like spatial awareness and problem-solving in your students.
All early childhood teachers know how important play is for children's development and learning, but do you know much about play schemas? Play schemas are the key to implementing a purposeful age-appropriate pedagogy that caters to the developmental needs of your particular students.
What Is a Play Schema?
Play schemas are repeated patterns of behaviour. Have you noticed a student always lining up the blocks and animals at block play or making patterns over and over with loose parts? Then you have witnessed the positioning play schema. This play schema is only one of nine schemas most commonly observed in young children.
If you are interested in learning about the other eight play schemas, you should check out this blog post: A Guide to Play Schemas in Early Childhood Education
Schematic play is all about how children play and explore their learning resources and their environment. It isn’t a specific type of play like dramatic play or sensory play. When you understand play schemas, you suddenly observe them happening all the time and in all areas of your classroom.
For example, you might notice one of your students sorting the loose parts into colours and placing them in a line along the top of a fence made in the blocks area and then creating patterns with materials from the collage trolley. This child is demonstrating schematic play through positioning.
You might think these observations describe different types of play in different play scenarios, but overall, the schema in these play scenarios is actually the same one.
Once you’ve observed a child displaying a certain type of play schema, keep your eye on them. You’ll probably notice that child repeating the same action schematically somewhere else in your classroom too.
Young children become fascinated with certain play schemas. They will experiment and test their schematic learning theories with a vast range of objects and materials. Their focused schematic play will happen repeatedly and in all areas of your classroom.
Why Are Play Schemas Important for a Play Based Classroom?
Understanding play schemas and being able to identify the ones your students are developing is critical to the success of any play-based learning pedagogy.
When you know about play schemas, you will
Better understand your students and their developmental needs.
Broaden your understanding of how children learn.
Tap into your student’s interests and know how to create a child-led curriculum.
Increase student engagement.
Learn how to encourage your students to become more curious.
Deepen the learning and the intensity of their investigative play sessions.
Make the right observations to inform your planning.
Be able to easily differentiate the learning experiences you offer your students.
Not every learning provocation is going to be a hit in your classroom. If you have ever set up a learning invitation that you are sure your students will love only to have it go totally ignored by your students, then you know what I mean.
This used to happen to me too. It was soooo frustrating and disappointing. But not anymore!! Now I know about play schemas, I can set up investigation areas my students just can’t wait to explore!!
If you want to engage your students on a much deeper level and easily extend their thinking, you need an understanding of play schemas to guide you.
Once you learn about play schemas, you will document your students’ learning in a different way. You’ll be able to make the right classroom observations – ones that will help you differentiate and adapt the curriculum to suit the needs of your particular students.
Planning purposeful learning experiences is so much easier when you use your observations and knowledge of play schemas to inform you. Schema play can give you extremely valuable insights into your student’s passions, interests and developmental needs. You can use these insights to guide your planning and teaching. Neglected learning centers will be a past memory!
Understanding play schemas can also help you understand what can sometimes be seen as an undesirable classroom behaviour. For example, you might have a child constantly disrupting the Lego building area because they want all the red and blue blocks to make a patterned line along the carpet. How frustrating would that be for all the lego builders!
This behaviour might be seen as undesirable, but when you understand that this behaviour is coming from a child exploring the positioning play schema, you can set up a learning invitation to support this schema and turn the undesirable behaviour into a desirable one.
When early childhood teachers understand why certain behaviours happen, they quickly discover children do not simply misbehave. There’s always a reason for desirable and undesirable behaviours. Play schemas could just be that reason.
If you are interested in following the child or any child-led pedagogy, your teacher observations are extremely important. Understanding play schemas will help you to make those observations the right way. When you observe your students, you’ll begin to notice children demonstrating all the different play schemas. You’ll be able to use your observations to design learning invitations perfectly matched to students’ interests and developmental needs.
Using your knowledge of play schemas to inform your curriculum planning is a game changer. With play schemas in mind, your classroom observations and documentation will provide you with the information you need to set up the most purposeful and thoughtful learning invitations.
Recognising and understanding play schemas is critical to the success of your play based classroom.
What is the Positioning Schema?
The positioning schema is a natural pattern of behavior in young children. You’ll observe it when you see your students carefully positioning objects or their bodies in their play.
The positioning schema can be observed when you see a child experimenting with order and sequence. If you notice one of your students placing objects next to each other in some form of alignment or pattern, you have a student exploring the positioning play schema.
To identify the positioning schema in your classroom, look for ways your students are changing positions or orientations of either their body or the classroom resources.
For example, you might notice children climbing or crawling around the room. They are exploring how to change the position of their bodies. Children exploring the positioning play schema will also enjoy playing games that involve balancing or moving in different directions.
Students developing the positioning play schema might also experiment with rolling, stacking, or lining up classroom objects. Children will often line up objects or very thoughtfully place them in some type of careful alignment, like in rows, patterns, or lines. The positioning of objects can include stacking too. It isn’t always about aligning objects alongside each other.
Children with this play schema like to order and classify objects too. Sorting loose parts is a common activity observed in children with a positioning schema.
You will love these little positioners at re-set time because children interested in this play schema usually like tidying up and creating order in their learning environment. Unfortunately, though, they seem to also enjoy placing things in unusual places.
Children learning to understand this play schema can also become fascinated with forming queues. They are the ones insisting the other children in the class form a particular order when lining themselves up.
By carefully observing your children's play during investigation time and outside in the playground, you will start to identify positional schematic play patterns in their activities.
Sometimes this play schema can be misunderstood by educators and parents. They can become concerned their child is demonstrating elements of an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD behaviour. The positioning schema is a natural part of learning.
Play schemas are how young children make sense of the world around them. They will test their knowledge again and again as they confirm and organise what they know and understand.
What Are Children Using the Positioning Schema Learning?
Through play schemas like the positioning schema, children are learning to think logically and apply order in their environment.
Children with the positioning play schema will develop early math concepts related to numbers, shapes, space, and measurement. In particular, they will learn about classification, order and sequences, shape, symmetry, and patterns.
Repeating patterns are of great interest to children developing this schema too. So many math concepts rely on a student’s understanding of the positioning schema.
Children interested in the positioning schema will be developing their own body awareness and a sense of self as well. Schematic play helps young children to represent their thoughts, feelings, and ideas symbolically.
By supporting the positioning play schema in your preschool, kindergarten, or grade one classroom, you will be helping your students to develop important skills like spatial awareness, problem-solving, and even self-regulation.
The positioning play schema can also help your students with their gross and fine motor skills. As children maneuver and position themselves and classroom objects, they will fine-tune their motor skills.
Much of the early years curriculum is related to the positioning schema. Many of the skills needed to reach the Foundation Stage and Year One benchmarks are also the skills being developed by children with an interest in the positioning play schema. These students will be:
Increasing their body awareness.
Developing fine and gross motor skills like balance and coordination.
Fostering their emotional learning skills.
Exploring lines and angles.
Recognizing differences and similarities and learning about scientific and mathematical attributes.
Learning to concentrate for extended periods of time.
Exploring patterns.
Learning about cause and effect.
Developing visual discrimination skills.
Learning to classify and sort.
Fine-tuning their spatial awareness.
Using their senses to make scientific observations.
Developing creative and critical thinking skills.
Building science and math skills like predicting, estimating, planning, problem-solving, and measuring.
What Vocabulary Supports the Positioning Schema?
Any Positional and Classification Language.
on top of, beneath, under, underneath, above, below, next to, beside, between
behind, in front of,
inside, outside
tall, long, short, wide, size, shape, colour
straight, curved,
21 Activities to Support the Positioning Schema in a Play-Based Classroom
In a play-based classroom, you can provide your kindergarten and grade one students with various hands-on activities and resources to support their interest in the positioning schema.
To support this play schema, just remember how fascinating the need for order is to these students. When setting up your classroom, you just need to ask yourself two things.
What materials do you have that would support your children to manipulate and position objects or their bodies?
How can the activities you plan to support this schema be linked to your curriculum?
Remember, children exploring this schema will be fascinated with sorting, ordering, and making patterns, so loose parts will be essential and your go-to resource for supporting this play schema.
If you want to collect loose parts for the children to use in your classroom, you should grab this free list of over 150 loose parts ideas. It has heaps of ideas for easy-to-source loose parts your children can use in their investigative play.
Many of the activities you will set up to support the positioning play schema in your classroom will teach and develop mathematical concepts.
You will be able to incorporate many hands-on learning experiences for your students to explore early number concepts, so make sure to include resources like number charts and cards, dice, number lines, and ten frames in most of your learning invitations. There will be heaps of opportunities for math play.
Here are 21 hands-on learning experiences to get you started supporting the positioning play schema in your classroom:
In outdoor play, provide climbing structures, balance beams, and tunnels. They are great for encouraging children to explore different body positions and orientations.
2. Children with this play schema enjoy rolling and stacking activities with blocks or balls. Hands-on investigations like these will help children develop their spatial awareness and coordination.
One of our favourite activities for supporting the positioning play schema and for consolidating number concepts is making number towers. This is a great math rotations activity and it makes an engaging investigation area too.
Grab these printable Number Mats HERE
3. Play games that involve movement and direction. Games like Simon Says or Follow the Leader can be fun and engaging ways to support the positioning schema.
4. Provide a variety of collage items in your Makerspace. Children will use these to create patterns and love sorting and arranging the collage items during the creative process. To support the positioning play schema, transient art projects using loose parts are great activities you can offer the children in your class.
5. Children with the positioning play schema love using pegboards and geoboards to create pictures and shapes. This is an activity that is great for both fine motor, and for exploring a positional schema.
6. Tangrams are another popular resource. Children with the positioning schema are fascinated with all the various pictures that can be made with tangrams. They love the challenge of putting the tangram back together again too.
7. Make sure to offer baskets of loose parts in every area of your classroom. Loose parts naturally invite children to sort, count and create patterns. If you would like to use the students’ interests in loose parts to develop curriculum aligned learning intentions, you will want to grab my Loose Parts Resources HERE
8. Children interested in positioning are interested in number lines and investigating how numbers are positioned along the line. You can provide printed number lines or use rulers and measuring tapes at your investigation areas.
9. Sorting and classifying is another interesting activity for children with this play schema. Loose parts will provide many opportunities for your children to sort and classify. Your classroom probably already contains heaps of loose parts children can use for sorting. These can be added to the block play area, to dramatic play spaces, or you can set up a designated sorting area.
Printables from Math Provocations for Number and Algebra
Sorting activities are common in our Foundation Stage and Grade One curriculums. This is because the curriculum designers know how important this skill is AND how fascinating it is to our young learners.
Sorting isn’t just a math skill. Sorting is part of the Literacy and Science curriculums too.
In Literacy, children can sort baskets of letters, words, and pictures. Phonemic picture sorts are a weekly activity in my Prep classroom.
In Science, there are numerous opportunities for sorting. Children can sort animals into habitats or sort items from nature according to the season. You’ll be surprised how often children are expected to perform sorts in our suggested curriculum lessons.
Offering these curriculum sorts in your learning invitations is one of the best ways to embed your curriculum learning intentions into your investigation areas.
10. Train Tracks and Road Mats are resources that lend themselves well to positioning schemas. You might think building train tracks or play roads are simple activities, but they actually require a high level of spatial awareness.
Children exploring the positioning schema will also like lining up other objects next to the track or road. Supply them with small toys or loose parts to encourage this play schema.
Tracks and roads can be hand-drawn by the children onto paper or cardboard, or you can supply wooden or plastic train track and road sets.
When we are exploring position and location or studying maps as part of the HASS Geography unit, my students love to make a box town. There are so many opportunities for the development of positional language and math concepts in this engaging activity.
11. Threading activities are traditional early childhood activities for good reason. It not only develops fine motor skills, promotes counting, sorting and patterning but it is also an activity children with a positioning schema really enjoy.
In grade one, we study procedural texts. Making bracelets and necklaces is the perfect way for children with the positioning play schema to learn about procedural texts.
Interested in setting up this investigation area in your classroom? You can download all the printables for free HERE in my Free Resources LIbrary.
12. Making those tracks with dominoes is another activity enjoyed by children with the positioning schema.
13. Pattern blocks and activities using them to create patterns and pictures is an engaging way for children to develop their positioning schema. I think you’ll find a set of pattern blocks in any preschool, kindergarten or first grade classroom. We use them to explore many mathematical concepts like
Shape Recognition: Pattern blocks come in various geometric shapes, such as triangles, squares, rhombuses, trapezoids, and hexagons. Kindergarten students can use these blocks to learn about different shapes and their characteristics. They can identify and name the shapes, compare their attributes, and classify or sort them based on their properties.
Spatial Reasoning: Pattern blocks provide opportunities for children to develop spatial reasoning skills. Kids will manipulate the blocks, rotate them, and fit them together to create various patterns and designs. This helps them understand concepts like symmetry, congruence, and spatial relationships important for developing the positioning play schema.
Patterning and Sequencing: Young students can use pattern blocks to create and extend patterns. They can arrange the blocks in a repeating sequence (e.g., square, triangle, square, triangle) or create more complex patterns with them. Patterning and sequencing are skills developed in most activities related to the positioning play schema.
Counting and Number Sense: Pattern blocks can be used for counting and developing number sense. Students can count the blocks they use, compare quantities, and explore basic addition and subtraction concepts. They can also use the blocks to represent and solve simple mathematical problems.
Problem Solving: Pattern blocks can be used as a tool for problem-solving activities too. You can give your students challenges or open-ended tasks related to the pattern blocks. STEM challenges like the ones HERE will encourage critical thinking, spatial visualization, and logical reasoning skills in your students.
If you are interested in setting up math provocations to support the positioning play schema, you will want to check out my printable math provocations.
14. Another popular activity for children with a positioning play schema is placing stickers on lines, shapes, or letters. Peeling off little stickers is a wonderful fine motor activity, but if you don’t have any little stickers, you can always use dot stampers or a cotton bud and a small dish of paint.
It’s not so much about peeling off the stickers but more about positioning items and following a line or path. When children are learning to write their name in kindergarten and preschool, or learning to spell words in grade 1 and 2, this is a popular hands-on learning activity.
15. Making mandalas or exploring Rangoli patterns is of interest to children with the positioning play schema. Children can create beautiful symmetrical patterns with loose parts or through mark making.
If you are using loose parts, glass gems, coloured stones, pattern blocks and wooden cookies work well. Invite your children to arrange them in lines, spirals, or circles, and other 2D shapes.
A pre-printed or teacher-drawn shape provides a simple structure for students to follow but still allows them to experiment with sequence, pattern and colour.
16. The home corner dramatic play area has many opportunities for children to explore the positioning play schema. Provide cutlery for children to position when they set the table. Add some flowers or plant cuttings and a vase for children to practice flower arranging. The flowers and plant cuttings can be real ones from your outdoor area or artificial ones purchased cheaply from discount stores and op shops.
17. Ten frames are a powerful tool to support early number concepts. You have probably noticed how often they are referred to in our math curriculum documents. Ten frames are a great resource for positional schemas too.
A ten frame is a grid of ten boxes, in the form of two rows of five. You can draw them or print them. Add them to any area where you have a collection of loose parts. Children with the positioning schema will spend ages arranging loose parts onto the ten frames. They are such a great way of exploring numbers in the context of ten.
18. Construction sets like Lego are very popular with children exploring this play schema. Kids interested in the positioning schema will create lines of blocks both horizontally and vertically. They will explore numerous positioning scenarios with construction toys, so try to have a good range of these types of resources in your indoor and outdoor learning invitations.
19. Bee-bots are a common classroom resource used to teach about position and location. They are extremely engaging to young learners. It is a small programmable robot shaped like a bee with buttons on its back that allow students to program its movements. They are perfect for helping students learn about the positioning play schema.
Bee-Bots are a wonderful introduction to basic programming skills too. They have a simple programming interface consisting of buttons that students can press to create a sequence of movements. By planning and inputting commands, such as forward, backward, left, and right, students learn the basics of sequencing and programming.
Using a Bee-Bot also encourages spatial awareness. When using a bee-bot, kids must consider the robot's starting position and how each command affects its location and orientation. By observing and predicting the robot's movement, students develop spatial awareness and an understanding of directional concepts like left, right, forward, and backward.
Bee-Bots also provide opportunities for children to practice and reinforce positional language. As they program the robot's movements, they can use and understand terms like next to, in front of, behind, between, and beside. They learn to describe and follow instructions that involve spatial relationships.
I like to use bee-Bots in problem-solving activities where my kids are given challenges or tasks to complete. These tasks might involve navigating the robot through a maze or reaching specific locations on a grid. My students need to analyze the problem, plan the robot's path, and adjust their thinking when they face obstacles or make incorrect moves. This type of activity not only develops positional language but develops critical thinking and problem-solving skills too.
20. One of the most common times that you will observe the positioning schema in action is when you have children playing with cars and parking lots. Some children will create a simple car park by lining up cars on the floor. If you notice your students doing this, add cars to your block play area. They will enjoy creating much more sophisticated parking lots and multi-level car parks with the blocks.
21. Box construction and Makerspaces are popular with children exploring their positioning play schema. When children create constructions from boxes and other materials in your Makerspace, they need to manipulate and position boxes in different ways. They will stack, arrange, and connect boxes to create their structures and develop an understanding of how the positioning of boxes affects the stability and balance of their constructions.
Building with recycled items like boxes also provides children with opportunities to explore spatial relationships. They get to experiment with positioning boxes in relation to one another and explore concepts such as beside, on top of, underneath, next to, and inside. They quickly learn how the positioning of one box affects the relationship with the other boxes in their structure too.
Box construction is all about problem-solving. As children navigate the challenges of creating stable structures they need to think about the positions and orientations of their boxes to ensure their constructions are balanced and secure. They learn to assess the stability of their structures and need to use their critical thinking and spatial reasoning skills to make any necessary adjustments.
The Makerspace is a place where rich positional language is developed. In this investigation area, children will describe their actions and plans. They will need to use positional language to explain the position of their boxes or to discuss the placement of various elements in their structures.
Overall, box construction and a classroom makerspace offer rich and open-ended play experience that supports the positional play schema. Through manipulating boxes, exploring spatial relationships, problem-solving, engaging in imaginative play, and developing language skills, children deepen their understanding of positions, orientations, and spatial concepts.
Conclusion
Understanding play schemas is crucial for every early childhood educator that wants to implement a purposeful and engaging play-based learning pedagogy.
As you can see, the Positioning Play Schema is a foundational part of our curriculum. You can easily support this play schema in your classroom by offering any of the child-tailored learning invitations and ideas suggested in this blog post.
These 21 ideas are just the beginning. The ways to support this play schema in your classroom are endless. Now you know all about the Positioning Schema, supporting it will be easy.
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