Schema or “mental concepts, as a generally way of thinking about or interacting with the ideas and objects in the environment” (Beginnings and Beyond 110). Schemas develop in everyone, regardless of age (110). For example, “young children learn perceptual schemas as they taste and feel; preschool children use language and pretend play to create their understanding; school-age children develop more abstract ideas, such as morality schemas, which help them determine how to act” (111).Young children best gather new information and knowledge through play. Jean Piaget believed “children learn best when they are playing, rather than being told, shown, or explained to” (110). Children can either assimilate schemas or accommodate schemas as they take in new information.
Assimilation occurs in all ages and it is the act of “taking new information and organizing it in such a way that it fits with what the person already knows” (111). For example, young children assimilate new information to information they already know, like a young child going to the zoo for the first time and seeing a bear. The child assimilated the bear as a dog, because the child organized the new information and absorbed in what the child already knows (110). The opposite of
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Let’s look at the previous example again about the child assimilating the bear as a dog. In this case, the child will accommodate the new information by having his parent correcting his information. The parent told the child, that this is not a dog, but a bear. The next time the boy goes to the zoo, he points at the bear and said, “That’s a bear.” Accommodation is taking new information and creating a new place for it to better understand the world (110). Jean Piaget’s 4 stages of cognitive theory showcase how children gather information and process it to understand the