Nursery World - Learning and Development: Prediction

The concept and practice of predicting teaches children about cause and effect. Early years consultant David Quinn looks at the science. Photographs at Oakey Dokeys pre-school, Essex, by Teri Pengilley.

Predicting is an essential thought process, an intellectual tool, that we need to make sense of the world around us. As young children develop, they gradually become less rooted in the here and now and start to grasp daily routines, so enabling them to predict that lunch is often followed by a trip to the park. As this ability to predict develops, it not only guides us through our daily life but promotes higher-level thinking and allows us to engage intellectually with the world.

Piaget and Vygotsky both developed a constructivist view of learning, whereby young children make meaning through experience, assimilating knowledge and making accommodations to their view of the world as their experience clashes with their already formed ideas.

As children work with others, discussing their ideas, their knowledge can be extended and the practitioner can support their thinking by deliberately reminding them of their prior experience and knowledge in order to help them make predictions - avoiding simple guesswork, and instead turning their first responses to a situation into more thoughtful predictions by using their understanding developed in a similar previous context.

Being able to predict aids children's learning across the curriculum. It enables them to make comparisons and build on their understanding of pattern and cause and effect. Let's take mathematics, for example, and the popular activity of threading beads. Here, children's understanding of a repeated sequence depends on their ability to predict the emerging pattern (see also box).

The EYFS guidance highlights predicting in Communication, Language and Literacy, where it recommends that practitioners encourage children to predict the outcomes and possible endings to stories and events.

Just how important prediction is to our ability to read and understand text is set out by Marian Whitehead in Supporting Language and Literacy Development in the Early Years. She explains, 'It is a short step from asking questions of texts to making predictions about what is likely to happen, and this is one of the crucial skills for the experienced reader as well as for the young beginner.

'The ability fluent readers have to pick up meaning at great speed and process lengthy and complex texts without losing their way is rooted in their fast and ever-changing predictions about texts at several levels, including overall meaning, individual word meanings, instant word recognition, letter-sound combinations, print conventions and cultural expectations, to name a few!'

Under Knowledge and Understanding of the World, the EYFS guidance instructs practitioners to 'plan activities based on first-hand experiences that encourage... prediction.'

Science, of course, falls within this area of learning, and it is this aspect of the curriculum that I want to focus on, as early years practitioners are generally so unsure of how to approach this subject.

Prediction is one of the science process skills, a series of integrated and increasingly sophisticated skills required to carry out scientific analysis. There are many listings of process skills, but one that I find especially useful for learning in the early years is:

1 Observing

2 Comparing

3 Classifying

4 Recording

5 Communicating

6 Predicting

7 Hypothesising

To engage children in scientific exploration, it is important that we first clarify what predicting means. Predicting is something beyond simple guessing. For a child to make a prediction, they need to use prior knowledge to make a suggestion about what might happen next. Let's consider two examples, as the context for a question is all-important.

You might ask children: Do you think it will rain tomorrow? With no prior discussion or consideration of the weather, they can only guess. However, if they look at the school weather chart to see the pattern of weather for the last few days and go outside to observe the pattern of clouds, then they have the prior information needed and are well placed to make a prediction. Whether they are right or wrong is immaterial; the key element is the enquiry that led to an informed guess.

Another question could be: Which toy car do you think would go furthest in the playground? An impulsive response might be 'this red one', as it is the child's favourite car. In this context, clearly the answer is a guess. If, however, the child is allowed time to investigate indoors, and it turns out that the red car goes furthest when released on the car track alongside the other cars, then they have garnered some knowledge on which to base their prediction.

Consider the learning that may occur when a child makes predictions while they explore floating and sinking:

The child arrives with some knowledge of the concepts of floating and sinking, given their experience of water play. Often this will be: large or heavy things sink; small or light things float.

The practitioner aims to build on this knowledge by giving the child two small spoons, one plastic, the other metal, and asks which spoon the child thinks will float, and why.

Given the child's previous experience, they could assume that the heavier of the two will sink, and may now be able to accommodate this new information in their current knowledge and recognise that some small objects sink.

Further explorations, and predictions, can build on the child's understanding by again challenging their current knowledge. For example, carry out experiments to demonstrate that some large and light objects can float (polystyrene packaging), as can some heavy and large objects (melon). Each experiment will shed further light on how material, shape and size affect an object's capacity to float or sink.

EXAMPLES OF PREDICTION

'Science' learning, as with all learning contexts, should be age-appropriate, stimulating and enjoyable. It requires careful questioning by an interested adult. On each occasion, the child needs to be given information on which to base their prediction, so that it is not just a wild guess. The prediction need not be correct; what matters is that the child is trying to accommodate new information in their current knowledge. Here are three examples.

Coloured sweets

Cover the base of a white or clear dish with water. Introduce three coloured sweets and ask: 'What do you think will happen if you place the sweets in the water?'

Give the children time to make and discuss their predictions. Take all the children's predictions seriously.

The children could make a simple drawing using thick felt-tipped pens, first to indicate where they plan to position the sweets and then to draw what they think will happen. The drawing can be used as a record of their prediction.

Let the children position the sweets as in the diagram and encourage them to observe what happens. Compare the plate with their drawing after two minutes. How accurate was their prediction? What has actually happened?

Plan further experiments to develop the children's knowledge of diffusing and colour mixing. Again, you could record each on a simple diagram. What would happen: if you placed four/six sweets on the plate? if the sweets were only red and blue/yellow and blue/orange and pink? if the water was icy cold/warm/hot?

The 'magic' water pourer

Make small holes in a variety of plastic bottles with caps - a heated knitting needle makes 'clean' holes in them. Bore holes in the side of some (one, two and three holes); holes in the bottom of others (one in the centre; one off centre; two or three holes), and holes in the side and bottom of the remainder.

Start with the bottle with a single hole in the centre of the bottom and show the children what happens when you fill it, then loosen the cap. (The water streams from the hole.)

Let the children choose and fill a bottle with more than one hole or a hole off-centre, and ask: What do you think will happen when we loosen the cap? Again, their predictions could be recorded in simple diagrams.

Let the children loosen the cap. Was it as they predicted? What happened to the water? (The water will stay in the bottle.) Avoid describing the children's predictions as 'right' or 'wrong' - rather, emphasise the need to learn from their observations in order to make other predictions.

Carry out further experiments using the bottles with the different number and position of holes. Is the result always the same?

Floating and sinking

Cut thick card into a selection of sizes (A6, A7, A8, and A9) and £2 in pennies. (A 2p coin weighs exactly twice as much as a 1p coin.)

Float a piece of A8 card in the water tray. Explain to the children that it is one of your rafts and you want to find out how many pennies each can support.

Add pennies one at a time to the raft until it sinks. Encourage the children to count the pennies. How many did it carry?

How many do the children think the A7 raft will carry? Their ability to predict will, of course, depend on their stage of mathematical development, but guide them towards a conclusion. For example, show them that the A7 raft is twice as big as the A8 raft.

The most experienced children could build up the pennies on two A8 rafts and photograph the results as evidence. Once the raft has sunk, count the pennies, drawing the children's attention to the fact that the 'sinking' number is one more than the raft's maximum load, and this can be compared with the prediction. Again, it should be stressed that we can learn from the comparison, and it really doesn't matter if the prediction isn't exactly correct.

AROUND THE NURSERY

Developing young children's ability to predict should not, of course, be confined to the occasional adult-led activity. Opportunities for predicting will present themselves daily in children's play and it is the role of the practitioners to capitalise upon these opportunities as they present themselves, intervening where appropriate and guiding children towards making predictions. Here are a few examples,

Design and technology area When making a junk model: How are you going to join the two boxes? What do you think is the best option?

Cooking When baking: What do you think will happen if we add more sugar/turn up the heat/add more milk?

Creative area When painting: what do you think might happen if you applied thicker/thinner paint?

Malleable materials When making a clay animal: Won't it stand up? What would happen if its legs were longer/body smaller/head bigger?

Water play When filling a tub with water: How many more jugfuls do you think you'll need? Would it be better using the small bucket?

Sand area When sieving sand: do you think the colander will empty quite quickly? What if we use the small sieve?

Book corner When reading Mr Gumpy's Outing: Will all the animals fit in Mr Gumpy's boat? Why do you think they might fall in?

Whatever the occasion, careful questioning and a clear presentation of the facts will lead children through a process of enquiry that will enable them to predict with growing confidence and so build their critical thinking skills.