Children learn how the world works through play, long before they understand it in their heads. In early childhood, it is not primarily the information acquired, but the experience and the spirit of exploration that matter most.

Your Scientist in the Crib

Babies use their five senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing to gather physical knowledge about their brand new world. Their major scientific tools are their eyes, ears, skin, fingers, and mouths. The moving shadow on the wall, a beam of sunlight hitting the floor, the noise of a truck, the beep of the microwave, the taste and texture of Jello®, the smooth or scratchy surface of a dog, or the smell of lilacs are examples of experiments waiting to happen. During the first year of life, babies are explorers, progressing from seeing to looking, feeling to touching, hearing to listening, smelling to sniffing. As their mobility increases, their investigations expand as well.

Babies respond to visual interest — patterns and colors, movements of objects, and shadows. Very young babies can follow an object in front of them, such as bubbles, and learn to predict how it will move in the future. As they grow, they learn to localize sound and smell. They conduct a number of experiments that will lead to understanding cause and effect (like dropping food, making a noise, pulling hair, or patting the cat).

Your Toddler: Scientist on the Move

Toddlers and 2-year-olds have become active, mobile investigators, “getting into” things with gusto, and applying language to their investigations. They have moved from observing to making things happen, from dumping and filling to lining up and sorting, from manipulating to collecting and classifying. They understand sameness and similarity, and cause and effect fascinates them.

A toddler’s experiments involve exploring the environment with their new agility and mobility: hauling, dumping, dropping, and rearranging things; crawling in and out, going up and down, and handling and mouthing everything they encounter. Experimenting with textures, such as natural materials, Play-Doh® or fabrics, encourages fine motor development (e.g., using the thumb and forefinger). Water play is also a great way to experiment with pouring and mixing.

Your Preschool and Kindergarten Scientist: Building Concepts

During the preschool years, children’s motor, language, and cognitive skills are growing by leaps and bounds. From ages 3 to 6, children begin to use their emerging cognitive skills in observation, counting, recording and organizing to acquire fundamental concepts, and they are learning the discipline for purposeful, systematic investigation. They are constantly experimenting to discover how the world works by acting on the materials around them and the environment: throwing, pushing, building, squeezing, climbing, combining, tearing apart, and anything else their minds can imagine.

The National Science Education Standards emphasize that for children the essence of learning lies not in memorizing facts, but carrying out the processes of inquiry — asking questions; making observations; and gathering, organizing and analyzing data. The concepts and skills that children construct during the preschool years are essential to investigating science and math problems.

Concepts are the building blocks of knowledge that allow us to organize and categorize information. Much more than younger children, 3-to-6-year-olds are able to develop and test concepts and learn fundamental process skills. They can now organize and categorize their information and understandings. Instead of spontaneous, unplanned, and reactive sensory discoveries, they can now plan and carry out systematic explorations. They explore, form a question in their head (“Where is that worm?”), use trial and error, and collect and organize data to answer a question.

Preschool and kindergarten children are learning to classify objects by grouping and sorting according to properties such as size, shape, color, and use. They learn science when sorting objects collected in the back yard, the beach or on walks. They categorize objects that float and objects that sink in the bathtub. When building a block structure, they take objects apart and reassemble them. They investigate parts of plants and animals or read a book about how a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly.

They can now use tools to observe and measure: magnifying glasses and microscopes, measuring tape and cups, thermometers and scales. As they group, sort, classify, chart and measure, they are also on the road to mathematical knowledge. And with caring adults who delight in their discoveries and encourage them to communicate through conversation or pictures journals, they are becoming articulate, conceptual thinkers.

By age 7, children are capable of abstract thought, and their thinking is far more sophisticated. They are capable of more systematic trial and error, investigations that occur over a much longer time frame, and the use of many new tools. They embrace the scientific method as they learn from books, the Internet, and the ideas of others. Their teachers in first, second, or third grade are making more use of conventional math and science vocabulary. The children’s increased linguistic skills enable them to explain their own concepts and reasoning and work as a team. They are very much on the road to adult science.

Your School-Age Scientist: Joining the World of Science