Any parent knows that getting a young child from point A to B swiftly can feel like an exercise in futility and battle of wills. You can almost see their little brains churning with ideas to escape the shackles of your hand and check out things that are far more interesting than the car, the house, or the Shop Rite: the filthy garbage can across the parking lot, say, or perhaps the thicket of poison ivy behind it. When this sort of thing happens with my curious 2-year-old, and it does constantly, I usually resort to picking him up and carrying him, which frustrates us both.
But do you know that children as young as 8 months old are actually programmed to explore? And that when they do, they actually use techniques that are the building blocks for scientific study: including developing hypotheses and testing them, making predictions, and inferring the causes of failed actions?
These are the findings of Alice Gopnik, Ph.D, a leading child psychology researcher and thinker who’s also a professor at University of California, Berkeley. She presented this research a couple years ago, and has since been a vocal supporter of giving kids more opportunity to interact freely with their surroundings, in a non-structured way. This, of course, is in stark opposition to the growing trend of enrolling younger and younger kids in classes and nursery school programs. (Not to mention parking them in front of “educational” apps. Guilty!) “What we need to do to encourage children to learn is not to put them in the equivalent of school, tell them things, give them reading drills or flash cards,” Dr. Gopnik has said. “We really need to put them in a safe, rich environment where the natural capacities for exploration, for testing, for science can get free rein.”
Obviously, parking lots (or even unfenced yards, for that matter) aren’t the best places to let a young child roam. But one of my goals of 
the fall is to give my youngest—who spends far more time in classes, car seats, and shopping carts than either of his older brothers ever did—more time “off the leash,” so to speak. I’ve found that something as short and sweet as a walk down the street, or a destination-less stroll around our local pond, seems to fill him delight. He almost always finds something I would have never noticed. Somedays, it’s an old gum wrapper. But the other day, it was some Queen Anne’s Lace and a lone baby carrot growing in a patch in our garden that I thought we’d fully harvested last month. (Inevitably, in these distraction-free outings, I wind up questioning and then discovering something as well; for instance, did you know that Queen Anne’s Lace is also known as “wild carrot?”)
While the act of exploring is, as Dr. Gopnik suggests, an end unto itself, I’ve found it fun with my kids to bring along a notebook or, in the case of little ones, a sheet of paper and a crayon with which we can record our findings; sort of a nature “I Spy.” They can circle or draw what they see, and be able to “report on” their discoveries with other family members later. Here’s a template of what I’ve been bringing along on our walks. Click on the image below and you can print it out for yourselves. It should be about 8 inches square when cut out, easy to fold up and tuck in a pocket.
Happy trails!
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