Nicola Hacking: Supporting a Child's Curiosity

Curiosity is a fundamental human trait. It’s a basic element of cognition, yet the biological function and neurological underpinning to this day remain poorly understood by scientists.

It can be very simply described as a desire to know or learn something. It’s that intrinsic drive towards ‘interesting’ situations, something peculiar, to find out about the world. How does it work? What will it do? Why is it there?

 But why? What is it about humans that make them curious? In its purest, caveman style form, learning about the world around us enables us to survive (except for cats, apparently curiosity kills them). We learn basic skills such as how and what to eat or drink, how to move to hunt and hide, how to stay warm and safe. And beyond this, we then learn how to thrive.

Now the world is rather different nowadays, and requires a completely different and far more complex range of skills (although I’m not sure which I personally deem to be more difficult - to chase down my dinner or to operate a smart tv), but the starter point of curiosity is the same.

As early years practitioners, we are all able to recognise this element of curiosity in children of all ages. From babies’ eyes watching you intently, to one-year-old’s smothering themselves in spaghetti sauce, to toddlers being into…everything! And this is great, maybe not when we’re tidying the contents of a cupboard back into it for the hundredth time today, happy lockdown everyone, but we do understand that it’s a crucial part of the learning process.

 Curisoity 

So how can we nurture and support it?

• It’s our job to make sure that our learning environment is first and foremost, safe, and this also means a consideration towards being age appropriate. Some of our amazing car boot sale curiosities can be incredibly stimulating in pre-school, but also a choking hazard in a baby room. I absolutely love curiosity cubes for this – These can be bought purpose made as clear Perspex boxes or made out of old fish tanks, etc. You put interesting or unusual items in them which the children can look at, but not touch, and use a range of questions in order to inspire their curiosity and extend their learning. They can also be a great way to safeguard something that it wouldn’t be appropriate or safe for them to touch.

• Use open ended resources and allow it to be child-lead. Open ended resources are those with no particular purpose or direction, something with which a child cannot only see one end product. A plastic car is generally always a plastic car, whereas a wooden block or stumpy stick could be a car, or a million other things. Perhaps a troll? Or a fish. Open ended resources and the environment they are used in give the children opportunity to use their existing skills and knowledge in a new area independently. The child determines what is used and how to use it, and in doing this, direct their own learning.

• Provide a huge range of different opportunities and sensory stimuli to suit different learning styles and schemas. Not every child learns in the same way and so you need to enhance the areas they are most drawn to, to allow them to best develop their own learning strategies. Children are also ready to explore different things at different times. The thing that sparked their curiosity last week may not be the same this week. Be ready to run with it!

• Don’t knock it out of them! When children are learning there’s no right or wrong. Perhaps a child may not be using an item in the way you, as an adult, consider it’s use to be, and it may not be what you had in mind when you spent an hour setting up that provocation, but consider what they are gaining from it? I remember we once set up the most fabulous tough tray farm inspired by a child’s trip to a petting zoo the previous weekend. It was pretty amazing, with a range of sensory elements, including Weetabix for straw bales. These Weetabix lasted around 2 minutes in the tray before they had all mysteriously disappeared, and the blue rice stream had gone with them. Now in all honesty, this was pretty annoying, because our tough tray activity had looked great and WE HAD USED OUR OWN MONEY, which we all know means the activity has to look amazing until everyone has seen it. But the Weetabix were later discovered, well-used and tattered down in the forest, as building blocks over a river for the fairies, the blue rice sprinkled on top to replicate fairy dust magic. The children had created their own possibilities from the resources, developing their language as they extended the activity, learning from and about each other. These Weetabix were used by the children for a week, in a range of scenarios, far richer in imaginative possibility that our little farm.

Curiosity is a basic element. But extend and nurture it, and it can be so much more.

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