Messy play : planning and Implementing messy play activities of inquiry science in the early years

Abstract

Children often play with everyday things such as a plate of spaghetti. Despite all the expensive toys around the house, kids find things like a cardboard box more interesting to play with. This dissertation explores the reasons for the fascination that children derive out of playing with all things messy and how they inquire about how the world works as they play, drawing an indisputable link between learning and playing through messy activities. Specifically, the study probes how messy play, organised in a classroom in this study, could create opportunities for child-initiated inquiry in science. The study involved organising five messy activities using paint, flour and water, jelly, mud, ice and much more all aimed at creating a link with a scientific or environmental concept through a hands-on and fun experience. The observations made of the children playing showed how the messy activities elicited a number of opportunities for scientific inquiry. The activities unleashed the children‟s innate curiosity about basic scientific phenomena. The study showed how children at a young age do possess some skills of inquiry and that there is potential to introduce forms of inquiry even within the early years. The study also showed difference in engagement between the three and four year olds, even if this reflected the children‟s level of development rather than their age.