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St Catherine’s News Autumn 2021
T H E YO U N G INQUIRING MIND Young children have naturally curious minds and a yearning to ask lots of questions. They want to know how things work and why things happen. This is one of the ways in which they make sense of their world.
“All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind.” MARTIN H FISCHER Questions are a powerful tool for educators to promote children’s thinking and learning. They exercise their sense of agency and develop complex problem-solving skills by asking questions and having opportunities to explore their curiosities. Within our Early Learning Centre (ELC), we take an inquiry-based approach to our curriculum. This captures the children’s spirit of curiosity creating an engaging curriculum that places the children’s questions at the centre of their learning.
Whilst inquiry tends to develop spontaneously as children engage with their questions and ideas, educators plan learning experiences with specific outcomes in mind. The curriculum is therefore responsive and flexible, and can adapt to the children’s ideas and questions. Their learning becomes more rich, meaningful and contextual. Young children learn best through active, hands-on discovery where they can think, hypothesise, predict, problem solve and discover their own answers.
When educators support children to investigate their own ideas, they foster independence and autonomy and promote inquiry and exploration as valuable approaches to learning. Our ELC philosophy acknowledges our belief that children are capable learners, and active constructors of their own knowledge and understandings. This view of learning reinforces the need for experiences that offer children opportunities to pursue their interests and shape their own learning.
