ABSTRACT
This chapter begins the discussion of what happens cognitively when children are playing. First, schema is introduced as the framework of experience that humans construct from birth throughout their life and that helps them relate to and integrate information. The chapter goes on to explain how children learn through play as they invest all the “toys” around them, from a mote of dust to the sound of a voice, with meaning, theory based on psychologist Melanie Klein's early studies in the 1920s. The discussion on play continues with the suggestion that children don't “disbelieve” the way adults do. Children's experience of the real world is limited. They create a circle of play populated with their personal version of the world which is a negotiation of the external world and their own experience, a concept introduced into child development theory by W.D. Winnicott, and into game theory by Johann Huizinga. Shaping children's engagement with experiences are cultural toolsets that have, over generations, evolved into societal norms. As children grow older and engage more with an external world, the cultural norms set by their family who hold the expectation these will be passed on, are challenged by today's easy internet access to global media and others' viewpoints.
