10 Ways to Promote Curiosity and Scientific Thinking in Young Children

Early support for curiosity and scientific thinking will help children achieve greater academic success later. And as early childhood expert Kathy Reschke says, “being a science expert is not required for supporting young children’s investigations.”

Adapted from some great Brookes resources on early childhood education, here are 10 simple, real-world ways to infuse your teaching with more support for children’s curiosity and scientific thinking.

Teach science vocabulary

Preschoolers are ready and able to expand their vocabularies to include words that scientists use. The best way to introduce those words is by using them yourself in the context of talking with children while they are engaged in an investigation, whether brief or involved. Try saying things like:

• What did you see when you looked at the bird carefully? Did you observe how its body moved?
• I saw you examining the bark on that tree. You were touching it and looking at it so closely.
• You’ve been asking a lot of questions about the snow outside. I wonder if you would like to investigate—find out the answers to your questions yourself. I can help you.
• You have been having fun sending the toy cars down the ramp you built all morning! Which one do you predict is the fastest one of all—which one do you think will beat all the other cars?

Ask open-ended questions

During play or storybook reading, pose open-ended questions that prompt children to explain their thinking or explore a new combination of ideas. For example, when children are building with blocks during free play, ask them questions like, “What are you building? What is that going to be? Why did you build it?” When reading a story, ask questions like, “What do think will happen? Why do you think the character did that? What would you do if that happened to you?” To keep a feedback loop going and help the child delve deeper into an idea, encourage many possible answers by asking, “What else could we do?”

• FACTUAL BOOKS

Infuse your environment with novelty

Is there something new for children to learn or explore every day, even if it’s just a new song, story, or object? (Nature is rich with opportunities for exploration; consider bringing in seashells, pinecones, or various rocks for kids to examine.) Providing a rich curriculum with new experiences and new materials for children to investigate can stimulate curiosity, reduce boredom, and prevent negative behaviors that stem from a lack of stimulation.

Add photos of the real thing

Whatever the age of children, and whatever the topic they are exploring, adding photographs of the real thing can enhance and expand their investigation. Photos can prompt children to look more closely or differently at the actual objects they are exploring. Close-ups of flowers, insects, or eyeballs can show them new details. Photos of climates, wild animals, or rocks that are different from those they’ve been exploring can foster a whole new set of questions to investigate. Don’t forget to take photos of children’s investigations as well. When they can recollect and reflect on what they observed, how their experiments worked, and their explanations, they will often have new insights.

Give sustained time to engage in play

If your schedule requires too many transitions, children will not have enough time to think through the problems that arise in play, develop the themes for their play, or implement a creative new idea. Extended periods of free or loosely structured play, in which adults follow the children’s lead, will encourage kids to be curious and experiment with new things.

Offer nonfiction books

Be sure to include non-fiction, age-appropriate factual books in your learning environment. Offer books on a variety of topics that children can access on their own, along with storybooks, to nurture curiosity and spark new investigations. And when children begin a more in-depth exploration of a topic, head to your local library and ask the children’s librarian for help in locating books that may be helpful.

Incorporate scientific thinking into mealtimes

Scientific concepts can be worked into any routine, and mealtime is full of opportunities. Here are a few ideas for integrating science talk into mealtimes:

• Observe and investigate the different foods you eat. Classify them and identify their different parts.
• Discuss how the foods you are eating came to be there. How were they grown or manufactured?
• Talk about the digestive system as children chew, swallow, and eat.
• Discuss the effects that the foods you eat have on the body. For example, you might talk about how our bodies use energy/fuel, or which nutrients are present in food and how they impact the body.

Document children’s predictions

Making predictions is a way of expressing curious thinking. One way to model and promote prediction-making is to take a survey of children’s answers to a question you pose. During storytime, for example, you could ask a question like, “Will a wall solve the gardener’s problem by keeping the bunnies from eating his vegetables?” Draw a simple chart with one column for “Yes” and the other column for “No,” have each child give their prediction, and record each prediction with an X in the appropriate column. Help the children count the number of “Xs” in each column and record the total number of “yes” and “no” predictions.

Wonder out loud with children

Start your activities with a prompt like: “I wonder what would happen if…?” and encourage children to speculate with you. While reading a book at storytime, model curiosity out loud: “I wonder how that bird can fly.” When adults share the things they wonder about, it encourages the curious behavior they want to see children engage in.

Model curiosity and discovery

Admitting when you don’t know the answer to a question—and demonstrating your interest in finding out—teaches children to enjoy the process of learning and discovery. For example, you can admit, “I don’t know why the sky looks blue; that’s a great question. Let’s look it up.” Acknowledge an unexpected question or answer by saying something like, “Wow, I hadn’t thought of that! We can find that out. Thanks for sharing that idea.”

Promoting curiosity and scientific thinking doesn’t have to be a complicated task! Use the ideas in this post to get started, and then invest in the helpful resources behind this article for more guidance you’ll use all year long.

• Tips 1, 4, 6 adapted from Kathy Reschke’s Quick Reference Guide on Curiosity & Scientific Thinking
• Tips 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, and 10 adapted from Engaging Young Engineers by Angela Stone-MacDonald, Kristen B. Wendell, Anne Douglass, and Mary Lu Love
• Tip 7 adapted from Meaningful Mealtimes by Yev Veverka, Susan A. Ramage, Christy Baker, Kelsey Milne, & Emilie Dupont