What Piques Your Child's Curiosity?

"We have to dream. How else will we make a future that does not yet exist?" - Simon Sinek

"Encouraging curiosity in young children and cultivating their eagerness to learn may be a potential intervention target to foster early reading and math academic achievement at kindergarten age."                                                                                      - (Shah, Weeks, Richards & Kaciroti, 2018)

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What does your child know about:

These were the topics we generated in one 30-minute time frame in a grade 1/2 class when I asked: 

What would you like to know more about that you can't do on an ipad or laptop? It can be anything!

Curiosity lives in these responses - while we generated approximately 50 things the 26 students in the room were interested in finding out more about, it took us 30 minutes to capture all the words in writing simply because every word included a child's story about why they wanted to know more - or an experience they had that made them wonder about something - or a particular experience with something they wanted to elaborate on or spend more time engaging with overall. Every time these 6 and 7 year olds identified something they wanted to know more about, they also had a story explaining why they wanted to know more!

This is where we find what motivates our children to invest more energy into learning about their world, where we discover particular interests and fascinations. They will be different than the things that fascinate their parents or siblings - and should be since we are all individuals, born to be unique beings on a planet with almost 8 billion humans living on its' surface.  

Because our children are interested in different things than we might be does not mean we stop offering invitations to learn alongside us as we engage in our particular passions - quite the contrary!  As we demonstrate and explore our passions, we are simultaneously modelling for our children that is absolutely acceptable to pursue our fascinations as well as offering ideas for how they might engage in discovery about any specific interest or idea that captivates their imagination.

Children need to know it is okay to pursue a passion or fascination and launch a quest to find out 'more' about any thing or any interesting topic, place, idea. Parents are our first and most influential models for exploring new ideas, uncovering new information, investing ourselves in new pursuits and activities.  As a parent engages in a preferred activity, regardless of whether their child is equally enamoured with the same activity, seeing the parent invested in the pursuit will motivate the child to do the same - often providing a beginning path to get started. 

In these days of limited social access due to the pandemic, and especially in winter when anyone who is not captivated by cold weather outdoor pursuits might feel rather limited in possibilities for active engagement, pursuing curiosities offers a whole avenue of investigation and exploration!

A couple of things have motivated me to write about what piques children's curiosity - children themselves to begin with! Every time I engage in any sort of conversation with children about what they would like to know more about or what they are curious to try doing, they always have an answer and it rarely has anything to do with digital programs (and, if it does, then I will say 'what about something you can't do on the ipad or the laptop?' and provoke different thinking). 

40+ years of parenting and 35+ years of teaching have never let me down when I ask this question - I rarely ask 'what do you want to do?' when a child says they are bored, or tired or 'want to do something'.  Often I send them off with a piece of paper and a writing instrument and say 'come back in 10 minutes with a list of what you would like to do more of, know more about, try again or for the first time...' I have never been disappointed with the results because children are, at heart, outside-the-box thinkers. We just need to give them space, permission and encouragement to step outside of the moment and refresh their thoughts.

Last week I watched - through the powers of social media -  Julie van Rosendaal, a Calgary chef/cookbook author/parent, spontaneously offer online cooking classes to children who were unexpectedly home for a third week of winter break.  The response was significant and she certainly bravely encountered many obstacles and upsets from being torpedoed in Zoom to an oversubscribed group. As I followed her on Twitter and admired how swiftly she adapted to the challenges, I also marvelled at the investment of the children in this new experience - from afar of course - and their eagerness to try something different as they interacted with Julie, cooked in their own kitchens, asked questions, exchanged stories. Technically, they did do this on a laptop or ipad but only as a starting point - the whole story played out in over a thousand kitchens across Calgary and, I am confident, will yield many potential chefs, kitchen gourmet cooks and cookbook readers as a result!

My second reason for addressing curiosity in my blog - as Julie cooked with kids experiencing a COVID-provoked extended winter break, I came across extensive statistics on the impact of the pandemic on children. Several of these stats revealed increased screen time for kids accompanied by decreased socialization and corollary increases in anxiety and depression. Which got me thinking about how we might inspire children to try new things, investigate novel ideas or discover more information about things they are curious about.

We live in a digital age - even as old as I am, I have never lived in a time where there was not access to television, radio, digitally-delivered information. And our sources of digital information are so enormous in today's world that they actually surpass the real world in magnitude (hence the onset of the metaverse - which, from my perspective, is a huge investment in adult imagination).  Hands on experiences, often guided by an adult but not necessarily an expert adult, offer children an opportunity to invest their imaginations, energy and senses in ways digital experiences are simply not capable of offering (at least, not yet!).  In piquing curiosities with children we also often discover new ways to invest physically and emotionally in human experiences and it is often these unexpected experiences that launch the most creative, innovative thinking as children grow and discover their roles, places and participations in the real world. 

What piques your child's curiosity?  Chances are they have things they would like to know about far beyond what a parent imagines they are interested in learning more about - or in doing, creating, trying, exploring. Whatever they are curious about, they need to experience ways to explore, discover, experiment, investigate, create outside the classroom and in their world.  The avenues for exploration are truly vast and diverse - from reading, watching information on tv or digitally, visiting new sites, trying new experiences at home, acquiring new materials to try to manipulate (whether clay, wood, nails, fabric, yarn, rocks, etc), sharing ideas with others who are interested as well, documenting these new understandings and experiences in photos, sketches, words (even digitally!) are all inviting, invigorating aspects of being a child with the capacity to be curious, fascinated, inspired.  

Encouraging children to pursue their curiosities, their fascinations, their passions will motivate and inspire critical thinking and innovation, communication and collaboration. They may not echo our passions but they will most certainly acquire skills in sharing and advancing their own passionate pursuits and curiosities!

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School