Picture this: your little one is mixing water and sand together and amazed at how it transforms into a different texture when combined. Throughout the early years, children often become fascinated with activities for kids that involve watching how things transform. This playful urge to watch things change is an indication of the transformation schema – where they repeatedly participate in such developmental behaviours.
As parents, it is necessary to support your child’s instinct to throw, pour, mix, crush, or cut, not as something to discourage but as something to nurture and guide. Not doing so might limit their potential to develop important developmental milestones. By supporting their repeated playful behaviours – play schemas – you will help shape their natural instincts into meaningful experiences. These will not only enhance cognitive growth and build foundational skills that will serve them for a lifetime but also direct their playtime into a learning opportunity.
In this blog, we will learn about the potential of children’s play patterns and explore how we can enrich each stage of a child’s transformation schema play.
What is the transformation schema?
The transforming schema is a type of play pattern typically observed in early childhood development. In this pattern, children engage in actions that involve changing the state or form of objects.
While they engage in a number of activities for kids in the obvious sense, if you find them excited about mixing colours, melting ice, moulding clay, or combining different materials to create something new, they are essentially indulging in the transformation schema. These transformations help them understand the properties of different materials and how they can manipulate them. Think about all the moments when your little one got excited about changing seasons or how their bodies evolve as they grow.
Supporting this schema is crucial for child development as it will help develop their problem-solving skills, creativity, and even scientific thinking. It is necessary that, as parents, we provide them with a safe environment, open-ended materials, and opportunities to explore transformations.
Learn more about transformation schema and other play schemas in detail here.
When does the transformation schema occur?
When children indulge in various activities, they display their play schemas through their repetitive play patterns. Mostly around the age of 18 months and well into their fifth year, children show a natural inclination to experiment with how objects and materials change.
Their little minds are going through cognitive growth at this stage, and motor skills are developing, too. They are now more eager to explore the environment around them and participate in hands-on activities. Designing age-appropriate and specific activities for kids that support this stage is necessary. Since the concept of cause and effect plays an important role, engaging them in activities that involve sensory experiences, such as mixing water with sand, adding colours to the dough, or pouring liquids, will help them experience the transformation schema better.
You must provide them with open-ended resources like clay, paint, and other sensory materials to encourage play as it aligns with your child’s natural developmental timeline.
What are the behavioural indicators of the transformation schema?
The behavioural indicators for your child are often marked by activities that are exploratory and hands-on in nature. They reflect your child’s desire to experiment and observe changes in their environment. The common indicators of such behaviours depicted through various activities for kids are:
- Mixing substances: Children often mix different substances together to watch how they transform into something new, like combining sand and water.
- Pouring liquids: Sometimes children can be observed pouring liquid into different things to see how they interact or change form like pouring water from a cup into a bowl and back again.
- Blending colours: One of their favourite activities is when they mix different colours of paint to observe new shades or create new or patterns.
- Crushing, mashing, or tearing: If your little one is repeatedly crushing leaves, mashing food, or tearing paper into little bits, they aren’t being naughty. Instead, they are exploring how various objects transform when manipulated.
- Experimenting with melting or dissolving: Your child might be fascinated with cause and effect when they watch ice melt or sugar dissolve in water. This is an indication of their indulgence in a play schema and learning about the consequences of different actions.
- Stirring: If they are stirring different ingredients or materials to see resulting transformations, then this repeated pattern of play is actually their repeated pattern of trying to learn through such activities for kids.
- Altering shapes or forms: When you provide them with playdough, and they mould it into different shapes or reshape existing patterns with their hands or tools, this is a sign of the transformation of their play schema.
What skills do they develop by indulging in the transformation schema?
Engaging in the transformation schema helps children develop a range of foundational skills like:
- Cognitive flexibility: Your child is learning to adapt their approach based on the changes they observe, and these build cognitive flexibility as they try new methods that generate different outcomes than expected.
- Sensory Awareness: Whenever they are feeling, smelling, and seeing changes in materials, your child is sharpening their sensory perception and gaining a better understanding of different textures, temperatures, and consistencies.
- Fine motor skills: Activities for kids like pouring, stirring, and kneading strengthen hand and finger muscles, improving precision and control.
- Problem-solving: Children learn how to achieve specific outcomes by experimenting with different actions and combinations.
- Creativity and imagination: Experimenting with transformations encourages creativity as children explore various possibilities and outcomes, encouraging their imaginative thinking.
- First step towards scientific thinking: As they learn to observe cause-and-effect relationships, like caterpillars transforming into butterflies, they begin to understand basic scientific principles, such as life cycles or states of matter.
Look out for these interesting developmental milestones because these are signs that your child is learning and growing in a fun and playful way through learning about transformations. These skills lay a foundation for further learning and development, supporting your child’s overall cognitive, social, and physical growth
Montessori activities for kids that support the transformation schema
Here are some Montessori-inspired activities that support the transformation schema, allowing children to explore changes and transformations in a hands-on, engaging way:
- Food preparation: Simple recipes like making bread or kneading dough introduce children to transforming ingredients. They see how dry flour changes when mixed with water or observe how the dough rises after kneading.
- Ice melting: Offer ice cubes and warm water with various tools, like droppers or small spoons, and let children observe the melting process. This will introduce them to concepts of temperature and states of matter.
- Soap grating and mixture: Give your child simple tools to grate a bar of soap and mix it with water to create a foamy texture. This activity will introduce transformation by changing a solid into a liquid-based foam.
- Growing plants: Encourage children to plant seeds, observe how they grow, and note down the transformation process. Such simple but thoughtful activities for kids help them witness natural transformations over time and build a sense of responsibility and patience.
- Mud play: In an outdoor setup, allow children to mix soil and water to create mud. This activity is highly sensory and will enable children to explore texture transformation from dry soil to thick mud.
- Mixing colours: Provide your child with primary colours, water in a bowl, and droppers to mix colours in the bowl, observing how new colours form. This activity will also strengthen fine motor skills.
These Montessori activities engage children in hands-on experiences that naturally encourage exploration of the transformation schema, supporting cognitive and sensory development while engaging them in play.
List of words that support the transformation schema
Mix, pour, melt, combine, dissolve, blend, crush, mould, knead, soften, shape, expand, thicken, harden, transform, build, dry, wet, condense, evaporate, freeze, stretch, soak, stir, press.
How do we communicate the understanding of the transformation schema through language?
Use these phrases with your child when engaging in various activities for kids that support the transformation schema for them to understand better and be encouraged to explore the concept:
Descriptive language: Use specific, sensory-rich words that describe the changes happening so that they see and feel and easily link language with experiences. For example, say, “Look how the ice is melting and turning into water.”
Open-ended questions: Ask them questions with flexible answer to encourage them to think critically. Ask questions like, “What do you think will happen if we add more water?” or “Can you tell me what’s changing when you mix the paint colours together?”
Reflective statements: Use reflective comments to reinforce learning, such as, “You combined the colours, and they transformed into a new colour! Isn’t that interesting?”
Cause and effect: Explain cause and effect in simple terms, such as, “When we add warm water, the ice melts and becomes liquid. That’s a change.” Use “when” and “because” to simplify their concept of connecting actions to outcomes.
Storytelling: To make the transformation process easier to understand, you can narrate it in a story-like format. For example, you could create a mini-story with activities for kids, such as, “First, the dough was sticky, but when you added flour, it became smooth and stretchy!”
Here are some more specific examples using the words from the list shared above:
Mix: “Let’s mix the red and blue paint together to see what new colour we can create.
Knead: “Kneading the dough will make it soft and ready to shape.”
Soften: “The butter will soften as we leave it out of the fridge for a while.”
Expand: “Watch how the balloon expands when we blow air into it!”
Thicken: “The soup will thicken as we let it cook longer.”
Dry: “Leave the washed clothes out in the sun and watch how they become dry again.”
Freeze: “Let’s freeze the juice in the tray, and we’ll have ice pops!”
Press: “Press the playdough down with your hands, and it will flatten into a new form.”
For activities for kids and ideas to support your child’s schemas, check out our Play Schema Cards.