Unlock your child's hidden play patterns: Chris Athey's breakthrough schemas

Lines, circles, and boundaries in play become letters on the page. Discover how Chris Athey's schema patterns transform your child's physical explorations into the spatial understanding and motor control she'll need for writing.

Stand up and go to the door.

Open it.

Walk through it.

Now go to the kitchen and take a cup and fill it with water.

Now drink it.

You did the same thing three times.

It was a schema. Can you guess which one?

It's not trajectory or transporting, enclosing or enveloping. They're all close, but not quite right. So what's going on? None of the main schemas seem to fit.

That's because this is a new one, one identified by the brilliant British educational researcher, Chris Athey.

From outside to in, from inside to out, you - and the water - were going through a boundary.

Who was Chris Athey?

In the early 1970s, Athey led what would become known as the Froebel Early Education Project in London. Building on the foundational work of Jean Piaget, she took schema theory to new depths.

Her landmark book, "Extending Thought in Young Children: A Parent-Teacher Partnership" transformed how many of us understand children's seemingly repetitive play behaviours.

If you're a teacher, you must buy it. It's one of those rare educational texts that genuinely changes how you see children's learning.

But why should you, busy parent that you are, care about an educational researcher from the 1970s?

Because understanding Athey's insights might just change the way you see your child's play forever.

Beyond the basics: How Athey extended schema theory

Before Athey, the understanding of schemas was relatively simplistic. Most educators recognised a handful of patterns in children's play: transporting, connecting, rotating, and so on.

But Athey noticed something more profound happening.

She observed that children weren't just engaging with schemas through physical actions. They were representing these same patterns in their drawings, their language, their imagination, and their logical thinking.

My daughter went through a phase of drawing nothing but circles with lines radiating out from them from suns to bicycle wheels. At the same time, she took delight in watching the sprinkler pulse intermittent jets of water across the lawn.

What Athey would help me understand is that these weren't separate interests - they were all expressions of what she called a core and radial schema - exploring how things move outward from a central point.

The four levels of schema development

One of Athey's most significant contributions was identifying how schemas develop through different levels of representation:

1. Motor level: Physical actions and movements (twirling around, rolling balls)
2. Symbolic level: Representing the schema through another medium (drawing spirals, pretending a ribbon is a tornado)
3. Functional dependency level: Understanding cause and effect relationships (turning a tap makes water spiral down the drain)
4. Thought level: Using the schema to think more abstractly (discussing how hurricanes form, or understanding the earth's orbit)

Watching my children move through these levels has been fascinating. What begins as a toddler endlessly dropping food from a highchair (motor level trajectory schema) eventually becomes a seven-year-old designing elaborate marble runs with precise calculations of angle and speed (thought level).

A schema spotting guide: Athey's breakthrough patterns

While most parents become familiar with common schemas like trajectory or connecting, Athey identified several sophisticated patterns that often go unrecognised. Here's how to spot them in your child's play: