As a parent or caregiver, you may feel impatient when getting your child to carry out and complete a planned activity. However, to the child, this exploration process is the activity itself. Rather than rushing along, take a deep breath and make new discoveries together.

Playing and exploring in natural environments (nature walks) allow children to explore freely. Direct contact with natural environments lets children climb, build, take apart and experiment. This exploration helps develop their physical and intellectual capabilities.

One of the most important discoveries about the developing mind is how early and significantly very young children are uniting individual observations into coherent conceptual systems.

From very early on, children are not simply passive observers, registering the superficial appearance of things. Instead, they are building explanatory systems (implicit theories) that organize their knowledge. Such implicit theories contain causal principles and causal relations. These theories enable children to predict, explain, and reason about relevant phenomena and, in some cases, intervene to change them.

As early as the first year of life, babies develop implicit theories about how the world of people, other living things, objects, and numbers operate. Researchers have found that these foundational theories are not simply isolated forms of knowledge but play a profound role in children's everyday lives and subsequent learning.

Read more at CD-EXP-C03.

Studies have shown that mothers can scaffold or support their young children’s development through explicit verbal direction, and verbal and nonverbal behaviours that sustain children’s focus on things of interest.

Hence, caregivers who provide uninterrupted free-play time and talk to children about what they are engaged in can help promote exploration, discovery, and cognitive skills. Read more at CD-EXP-C01.