ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with young children's exploring. The word explore derives from the Latin to cry out. Newborn babies have well developed sensitivity to their environments which they perceive sensually, yet some of their earliest explorations are sentient, not just reflex actions. Perry regards curiosity as a key factor in exploration. Meadows distinguishes between exploration as an inductive trial and error process and deductive problem-solving that finds an answer that is already known by others. Young children in the YCAR study who were exploring sometimes applied their prior experiences to those experiences by using Patterned behaviour. In their settings, children in the YCAR project were often required by their practitioners to follow socio-cultural conventions. There is much literature to suggest that social encounters can be important contexts for children's exploratory behaviour. The chapter has defined exploration and has then provided an overview of ways that young children's explorations have been recognised in the literature around early childhood education.
