Last week, at one Papilio centre, the water table became the site of a genuine scientific dispute. Two children were convinced their leaf-boats would float. A third wasn’t so sure. What followed was several minutes of testing, retesting, and a fairly serious debate about whose boat was "winning."
It’s a small moment. It also happens to be exactly how scientific thinking begins.
The Thinking Behind the Play
Raising Children Network points to hands-on exploration - testing, comparing, predicting - as one of the foundations of early problem-solving and reasoning skills. Long before a child can define "hypothesis," they’re forming and testing one anyway, every time they ask "what happens if..."
This is why, at Papilio, scientific thinking isn’t something we schedule once a year for National Science Week (15-23 August). It’s built into how we plan learning every day.
How the Lifelong Learning Curriculum Supports It
Every Papilio centre delivers our Lifelong Learning Curriculum, designed in line with the outcomes set out in the national Early Years Learning Framework.
In practice, that means our educators are trained to notice the small, spontaneous experiments children run constantly - pouring, stacking, mixing, testing - and extend them with a considered question or a new material, rather than simply moving a child on to the next activity. A tower that falls becomes a question about balance. A colour that changes becomes a question about mixing. The Lifelong Learning Curriculum gives our educators a framework for turning these ordinary moments into documented, outcome-linked learning.
One practical expression of this is our Big Thinkers STEM programme, which brings a more structured layer of science, technology, engineering and maths exploration into the week ahead - simple engineering challenges, nature-based investigation, experiments scaled to little hands. But the programme sits inside something broader: a curriculum built around genuine inquiry, not just content delivery.
Try This Tonight
Sink or float. Gather a handful of household objects - a spoon, a cork, a toy, a leaf. Before each one goes in the water, ask your child to predict what will happen, and why. Resist the urge to correct a wrong guess - the reasoning matters more than the result.
More to Try at Home
- Rainbow milk - a drop of food colouring in a shallow dish of milk, then a dot of dishwashing liquid. Ask your child to describe what’s happening as it happens.
- Shadow tracking - trace your child’s shadow at two points in the day and compare. Ask what they think caused the change.
Small prompts like these do more for a child’s reasoning than any explanation you could offer them.
Why It Matters
National Science Week is a useful moment to notice it, but this kind of thinking is being built every day at Papilio, in the questions children ask, the small disputes they have over floating leaf-boats, and a curriculum designed to take those moments seriously.
Curious to see it in practice? Explore the Lifelong Learning Curriculum or find your nearest Papilio centre.