Playing with things: children’s ideas and projects

In earlier chapters, young children’s developing relationship with the people they grow up with, and the contextual environment they develop within has been explored. This chapter considers the playfulness of children’s learning and the disposition to be ready, willing and able to pursue a project or schema of ideas actively ‘observed to be a sort of “fingering over” of the environment in sensory terms, a questioning of the power of materials as a preliminary to the creation of higher organization of meaning’ (Cobb, 1977: 48). As described in Woods (2015: 64):

This ‘fingering over’ (Cobb, 1977) is suggestive of Piaget’s theory of schematic play, and a project or learning inquiry appears to be driven by a desire to make sense of a thing or idea, repeatedly. Rinaldi (in Dahlberg and Moss, 2005: 106-7) considers ‘The word “project” evoke[ing] the idea of a dynamic process, an itinerary. It is sensitive to the rhythms of communication and incorporates the significance and timing of children’s investigations and research’.