Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Collections

Nicole Weinstein discovers how to explore changes in materials scientifically, as part of our series on Understanding the World

The range of materials that we experience in our daily lives is immense. To make sense of their properties, we often classify them to establish common features. Particularly appealing to children are sensory natural materials such as wood, soil and moss. Providing collections of these and other unusual materials, alongside outdoor opportunities for exploring materials such as mud, sand and water, are vital in helping children make sense of the properties of materials. Many of these early explorations can progress into the study of chemistry, when practitioners can, for example, show how a liquid can change into a gas (see case study).

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