Young Children’s  Everyday  Inquiry:   A  Field  Study  of  a  Young  Girl’s Play Across Contexts

Abstract: This paper documents the naturally occurring ways in which very young children encounter opportunities for inquiry in their everyday lives. Understanding these early childhood practices is a necessary first step in drawing on these practices as resources for science inquiry learning. Using approximately 35 hours of interactional video data of a two-year-old girl in home and preschool settings, I describe the inquiry practices in which she engages at home, particularly how she orchestrates adult support for inquiry, and how she draws on aspects of her home inquiry practice in school. Based on her everyday experiences with inquiry and the common interactional arrangements of home and school environments, I suggest ways for conceiving of each setting as having affordances for the support of science inquiry among very young children