STEMpede

If our nation's interest in early childhood STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education were a genuine push for scientific thinking and literacy, it would probably look a lot less like this: 

                                                              And a lot more like this:

If we want to teach and encourage scientific thinking, we need to start with the classic: this scientific method.
For those of us who haven't been in a science class for a while, this is the scientific method:
1. Observe or describe a phenomenon/Ask a question.
2. Do your research.
3. Create a hypothesis.
4. Test that hypothesis.
5. Did it work? If it did, go to step 6. If not, return to steps 2-4.
6. Draw your conclusions.

For those of us who haven't been around infants for a while, people are born doing this. Take two-month-old A for example. He knows that he can be placed on either his back or his belly. He knows that he really prefers being on his back. One day, he is so angry about being placed on his belly, he propels himself onto his back again. Game changer. He knows he did it once, so what will he do the next time he's on his belly against his will? Try his hardest to replicate whatever movements got him back! He will continue testing his movements until he knows the exact series of muscle movements that brought him there.

STEM learning is as natural as breathing to infants and toddlers, and as adults we can support this by making ourselves aware of the pattern this thinking fits in, and making the children aware of it as they age into it.

What about preschoolers? Well, they'll learn a whole lot more about clouds by going outside than they will by pasting cotton balls on paper (which is admittedly a valuable sensory experience on its own).
From the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Preschoolers' Search for Explanatory Information Within Adult-Child Conversations, "During the preschool years, children assemble explanation-rich naïve theories (Carey, 1985; Wellman & Gelman, 1998), ask many questions (Chouinard, 2007; Hickling & Wellman, 2001), and actively pursue explanatory information, a motivation that has been variously characterized as an innate “theory drive” (Gopnik, 1998), a human curiosity about the world (Simon, 2001), or a desire to resolve disequilibrium (Isaacs, 1930; Piaget, 1954), among others."

The most important way to encourage STEM exploration in these years, then, is to have an adult (or even better, several adults) ready to engage in exploration alongside the child. This might mean taking a walk in your neighborhood; going to a park, zoo, or nature preserve; consulting an encyclopedia, whether paper or electronic; or being ready to experiment with a whole bunch of household STUFF.

The argument I hear most is, "okay, they want to explore, but what about constructs like numbers and shapes?" Then it becomes the task of the adult to observe and describe what the child is doing that involves those. "Wow, you divided your one string cheese stick into seven smaller ones!" "Let's jump onto these rectangular bricks to get across the park. I wonder how many rectangles we will jump on?" is much more memorable than "Color this rectangle. Now tell me how many sides it has."

As a final piece of evidence that education should be experiential and based on a child's interests, I ask only this: if you remembered the steps of the scientific method, who taught you, and why? If not, why don't you remember it?