Exploring play schemas with CONNETIX!

Understanding these schemas helps parents and educators support children’s cognitive and motor skill development in a way that aligns with their interests and natural urges. When parents and educators understand schema play it offers a window into a child’s world which boosts connection and reduces frustration (particularly common with children who love to throw).





There are several types of play schemas, and here I will discuss some of the most common ones, signs that your child may be exploring this particular schema and how you can use CONNETIX to further enhance schematic understanding.

• Create a delivery truck using the transport pack to move things like animals, pretend groceries, gems, letters
• Create a bridge or a tunnel to transport objects through and over different structures, expanding their understanding to incorporate ideas such as weight
• Create a train and take wooden people on a holiday, to a zoo, to school or Grandma and Grandpa’s house

This schema is about enclosing spaces or themselves. You may notice children putting everything into boxes, building cubbies, covering themselves in stickers or hiding under towels.





Using CONNETIX, children can create enclosed spaces like boxes, car parks, schools or vets, houses, a cot for a doll, a trailer, etc. You could offer additional resources such as silks, hankies or blankies to further the enclosing and enveloping. Alternatively, you could offer other resources to hide in the CONNETIX such as coloured rice, balls or peg people.

Children exploring the positioning schema often like to place items in specific ways, like arranging tiles in a line or stack. You may notice children lining items up in a row, sorting things in size, height or colour order. CONNETIX are perfect for creating symmetrical or organised designs, enhancing spatial awareness as well as understanding similarities and differences.

The trajectory schema supports children to figure out how things move through space, including themselves and other things around them. Examples of this in everyday life are jumping in puddles and watching water move, throwing things over the highchair or out of the pram, rolling and throwing balls, catching and watching bubbles, swinging and rolling, or twirling ribbons. The CONNETIX ball runs are the perfect play space addition to figure out how things move and what structures support speed, height and movement.

CONNETIX offer a new way to approach repetitive behaviours in a creative context. When children are provided the space and resources to play in almost any way that they choose, they will innately seek out the skills that they are wanting to learn. Schematic play is naturally curious and the repetitiveness is an uncontrollable urge, allowing the child to choose how they play, naturally creates opportunities to figure out their world.