Zozilla, etc.

According to Gibson and Gibson, affordances are opportunities for learning/action provided by a child's environment. New affordances are constantly being created as children experience new things.

Both of my examples of affordances center around my cousin Zoe, who is now five years old. The first involves puzzles, which afford putting together. Putting puzzles together demands object knowledge (i.e. which pieces fit together), differentiation (the pieces all have a different fraction of the whole image), and they require attention in order to reconstruct them correctly. Zoe is a busy child, and loves puzzles and games of all kinds. However,  she was bored when she had put all of her puzzles together so many times that they were no longer challenging. The task had lost its fun, and she was pretty vocal about it. Her mother's solution was to flip the puzzle upside down, so Zoe could reconstruct it based on the shapes of the pieces without the aid of the picture. It was a new way of completing the same task that required a new set of affordances, and Zoe's interest was rekindled once again.

The second example involves block towers. When Zoe was very young (somewhere between one and two at a guess), we would build towers with her blocks for hours. Or rather, I would build block towers and"Zozilla" would knock them down again and again.  She learned about the physical nature of the blocks, my towers, and her own physical abilities as she changed and un-did what I had created. Obviously, as she grew older, this game became less interesting and she moved on to new tasks and learning new affordances.