ABSTRACT
Piaget tells us that children learn through interacting with the world. Play and exploration start with children’s curiosity and their (maybe unspoken) questions: ‘What happens if I keep squashing this plasticene?’ ‘What if I touch ice – how will it feel?’ The chance to play provides the child with information from which they make meaning. The child adds newly gained experience to what they have already understood. If new experience doesn’t fit, the child accommodates their new experience by changing what they think: that is, they learn from the experience. They develop a story or model that fits with what they ‘know’. If new experience does not fit previous models, the child may rethink. For example, a child who has never played with jelly, seen a hamster or banged a drum will attend to the new input from their senses and find that it does not match with what they already know. This ‘failure’ to understand prompts the child to generate new ideas (such as, some red materials are sticky; small furry creatures are not all inanimate toys; if you hit round things they bang). Piaget envisaged the child as a ‘lone scientist’, engaged in constant enquiry and continually faced with the puzzle of new experience and evidence which creates questions in the mind. The child engages in empirical enquiry; up against problems of understanding, they resolve these by reconsidering or, as Huxley puts it, by giving up their preconceived notions.
