Dinosaurs dumped in the home corner; pockets filled with sticks and stones; and plates and saucers piled high on the carpet. These are just some of the scenarios that practitioners will observe when working with children with transporting schemes.
‘It’s no use thinking that children will limit the use of shopping trolleys to transport play food. Or prams to carry dolls,’ explains Lynnette Brock, director of SchemaPlay.
‘Expect to see small-world play figures piled high under the climbing frame or blue items placed in piles in the sandpit. Children are likely to want to move objects around the nursery – and outdoors – in unexpected ways, which is all part of their exploratory investigations.’
Schemes are powerful learning mechanisms that adults can use to develop children’s thinking. Offering free-flow play across the nursery setting, along with a varied collection of resources, can help children develop their own theories about the materials and resources they are playing with.
EXPLORING SPATIAL AWARENESS
Children with a transportation scheme will be interested in moving objects or collections of objects – as well as their own bodies – from one place to another using baskets, trolleys, bikes and scooters.
At this stage of development, children will be mobile and have the balance and coordination skills to walk confidently while carrying an object, or be able to push a trolley or pram containing objects.
When moving objects around with their hands, children can learn that some things are heavy and others are light, but big things can be light too. They will also pick up other characteristics of the objects, such as hard, soft, shiny or slippery.
Through transportation, children also explore spatial awareness and orientation. For example, while moving objects from one place to another, a child may need to negotiate and move around various obstructions to get to their chosen destination.
Lynnette says, ‘I observed one little girl repeatedly transporting objects in a bag from inside the classroom to a tepee in the garden. She took the same route each time: via the sandpit and past the wooden dinosaurs. Later, she re-examined the journey graphically, drawing a map, and explaining, “This is where you find the bags”, and, “Go all the way down here, keep going, keep going and then you get to the tepee.”
‘This demonstrates how widely children explore their experiences and schemes. Here, the transporting scheme is supporting mapping and perception of distance and location, which she is exploring physically, verbally and graphically.’
RESOURCES TO SUPPORT TRANSPORTATION
- Ensure there are enough resources for transporting – buggies, wheelbarrows, sledges, wheeled toys with spaces to carry passengers or materials. Try the Cart, £104.99, from Cosy, Early Excellence’s Red Trolley, £49.95, or its Small Green Oval Trug, £9.95. Or there is Hope’s Winther Wheelbarrow, £79.99.
- Provide plenty of buckets, containers and pulleys. Cosy’s Long Last Builders Buckets 2pk, £7.99, are perfect for transporting sand, mud, water or pebbles, and its Natural Measuring Set, £79.95, is great for picking up finer textures.
- Provide plenty of loose parts: logs, bark, sand, pebbles, leaves and pinecones. The Giant Tree Blocks, £46.99, from Cosy are great for exploring different sizes and weights outdoors, and Cosy’s Complete Natural Treasure Collection, £225, contains over 200 pebbles, pine cones, shells, sticks and more. Early Excellence’s Set of Natural Stones, £5.95 and Set of Wooden Discs & Slices, £19.95, are great for comparing, measuring, sorting and counting.
- Small lightweight bags and baskets allow children to collect and transport items around the nursery. Try Cosy’s Felt Bags and Balls (5pk), £29.99, which are great for grouping and sorting, or its Bonanza Bowls and Baskets Set, £29.99. Early Excellence’s Set of Carry Baskets and Blankets, £60.95, are great for children who like to pretend they are carrying around pets.
- Role-play enthusiasts may enjoy carrying around Cosy’s Basket of Babies (7pk), £52.99, or they may prefer to push their babies around in Early Excellence’s sturdy Buggy, £95, stopping off on the way to do some shopping with Early Excellence’s Supermarket Shopping Set, £20.95. Toddlers might enjoy pushing around Hope’s FSC Wooden Dolls Pram, £44.99, and shopping with Hope’s realistic Metal Shopping Baskets, £12.99.
- Include story books related to transporting, offered with props, so that the action of transporting can be carried out during the storytelling and children can then go on to recall the story using props independently. Try Spot Goes Shopping by Eric Hill. Or combine Early Excellence’s Baskets & Pulleys Collection, £65, with The Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunchby Rhonda Armitage.
- Wheeled toys are a vital part of transporting play and fantastic for building up muscle strength and co-ordination skills. Provide a selection of fun wheeled toys that offer children the chance to move larger materials from place to place, including each other. Try the Winther Viking Challenge Surfer Sofa, £179.99, or the Winther Viking Explorer Surfer Boat, £589.99.
- In sand play, offer dumper trucks, and in water play provide different-sized boats with space on board to contain objects. Small-world play might include airplanes or cars with small-world people.
CASE STUDY: Little Learners, Kent
At Little Learners in Kent, keyworker Cara Jane observed three-year-old Toby exploring the trajectory and containing schemes in a range of contexts: in sand play he filled the dumper trucks with sand and tipped it out repeatedly; in block play, he built towers (trajectory) and enclosures (containing), which he often sat inside. And in small-world play, he put ‘people’ into vehicles.
Recognising his interests, along with his exploration of shape and volume, Cara decided to ‘seed’ a range of transporting containers in the outdoor area, along with books about transport and journeys.
She says, ‘I seeded a rucksack, bags, trolleys, a supermarket shopping trolley and wheelbarrows, along with groups of objects to transport. At one point he told me, “I am recycling”, and this seemed like an opportune moment to bring in ‘matching’ – sorting objects that needed to be put into containers by their material characteristics.
‘We explored the activity of being a recycler and this excited Toby. He readily went in search of buckets to expand upon what I had modelled when looking at how the recycling truck works: all the plastic objects are placed in one container and the card in another.
‘At the weekend, his mother took him on a trip to the local recycling centre and when he returned, he created the most amazing recycling centre and ensured that every child who entered had their name recorded, something that he told me had seen at the recycling centre. He modelled to his peers how to match objects, sorting them into the correct containers.
‘This was the first time I had seen Toby taking a lead in play as well as demonstrating an interest in early writing, making marks to record a person’s name.
‘He was now applying a trajectory and containing/enclosing scheme graphically. Over the days that followed, Toby went on to transport the recycled objects to our junk-modelling area, counting the objects collected, which demonstrated an interest in quantity and volume. We then drew upon his trajectory scheme, which is all about lines, to support him to tally the quantities.’