Birth to three matters - Communities and Local Government

take into account the rich,natural,experiences available to children whoare included within a mainstream setting.During these first years they are activelytrying to make sense of the worlds inwhich they find themselves. As Donaldson(1978:111) comments after reviewingearlier research on babies ‘we mayconclude that there exists a fundamentalhuman urge to make sense of the worldand bring it under deliberate control.’Gopnik et al (1999) stress how babies andyoung children approach the world as ifthey are scientists, actively engaged inlooking for patterns in what is going onaround them, testing hypotheses, seekingexplanations and formulating newtheories.They suggest that two year oldsin particular have a drive to find out howpeople and their familiar world ‘work’:-‘as with scientists, finding the truth is morethan a profession – it’s a passion. And, aswith scientists, that passion maysometimes make them sacrifice domestichappiness.’ (Gopnik et al 1999:38).Gopnik and her colleagues go on tosuggest that babies play imitation gamesto try to understand other people, babbleto ‘try on’ language;and play games likepeekaboo and hide and seek to find outabout objects and how people see them.The research reported by specialist ECECresearchers such as Athey (1990), Bruceand Meggitt (2002), Matthews (2002),Davies (2002), Nutbrown (1994), andWhalley et al (2000) has providedpractitioners with powerful informationthey have used to explore young children’sschemas – early patterns of behaviourindicating that a child is working at asystematic investigation (see chapter 2for further information about schemas).As Nutbrown (1994: 11) comments:‘Early patterns of behaviour seen in babiesbecome more complex and morenumerous, eventually becoming groupedtogether so that babies and youngchildren do not perform single isolatedbehaviours but coordinate their actions.Toddlers work hard, collecting a pile ofobjects in the lap of their carer, walking toand fro, bringing one object at a time. Theyare working on a pattern of behaviour thathas a consistent thread running throughit…related to the consistent back-andforthmovement. The early schemas ofbabies form the basis of the patterns ofbehaviour which children show betweenthe ages of two and five years, and thesein turn become established foundationsfor learning.’EgocentricityPiaget (1962) argued that young childrenare egocentric, that they can only see theworld from their own point of view. Theyassume that everyone thinks as they do.Gopnik et al (1999) describe an ingeniousexperiment in which they showed thatc h i l d ren ro u g h ly younger than 18 mont h scould not see another’s viewpoint,by providing bowls of broccoli andbiscuits. When they asked a child under18 months to give them broccoli,sayingt h ey liked it be t ter than biscuits, the infant s88 EDUCATIONAND SKILLS B I RT H T O T H R E E M AT T E R S