THE EXPLORATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT IN

INITIAL EDUCATION
WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT EXPLORATION
OF THE ENVIRONMENT AS OWN ACTIVITY OF
EARLY CHILDHOOD?
Exploring the environment is one of the most
characteristic activities of girls and boys in early
childhood. When observing them, you can see that
they are constantly touching, testing, experimenting
and exploring everything around them; They are in a
constant search to understand and know the world. A
world configured by physical, biological, social and
cultural aspects, in which they act, interact and
interrelate with the environment of which they are
part.
The child learns by interacting with his environment,
actively transforming his relationships with the world
of adults, things, events and, in an original way, his
peers.
 Through their sensory and perceptual domain,
girls and boys explore with their bodies and, as
they acquire greater autonomy in their
movements, they move through different spaces,
expanding their possibilities of exploration. Thus,
in the interaction with objects, they begin to
recognize their properties. Subsequently, they
compare them and find similarities and
differences; They classify them, order them,
count them, etc. In this way, reaching g
experiential knowledge. This constitutes the basis
of representation, conceptualization and the most
complex mental operations.
Teachers and educational agents must recognize that
part of their role consists of accompanying and
strengthening the curiosity and initiative of girls and
boys. Hence the importance of promoting forms of
observation and organization of reality, and of
supporting and encouraging this desire to search, to
wonder, to be able to check and contrast actions.
The successes and failures that they experience in
resolving a situation provide them with essential
information to contrast their initial hypotheses, hence
the importance of those who educate them to find in it
a “window that they open for us so that we can
understand their vision of things, the discoveries they
make, the questions they ask themselves, the surprises
that amaze them” (Panigauga and Palacios, 2005, p.
73)
 WHAT IS EXPLORED?
In the public policy of Comprehensive
Early Childhood Care it is called “the
environment”. Environments are
physical, social and cultural spaces
where human beings live, in which an
intense and continuous interaction
occurs between them and with the
context that surrounds them.
(physical and biological space, Their wealth lies in the capacity
they have to promote the
ecosystem, community, culture and development of girls and boys,
society in general ). to promote the construction of
their subjective and daily life
and to link them with the social,
historical, cultural, political and
economic life of the society to
which they serve. belong
The idea that "life enters school and school goes to
life", proposed by these pedagogues, refers to the fact
that in the educational environment the events that
happen in other spaces are kept in mind, thus from the
pedagogical actions the everyday life outside of this, is
also a matter to explore, an example of this is: when a
child shares with his group that his mother is going to
have a baby, and from this event a diversity of
experiences is displayed to delve into this event, in
accordance with the interest of the group of girls and
boys.

Near - far
Within the pedagogical
task: the idea that we
should work from those
things that girls and
boys find meaningful
and that capture their
attention
Pedagogical experiences constitute possibilities to
undertake projects that allow us to delve into the
possibility of growing by exploring the environment,
creating questions around animals, such as: what fish
eat, how turtles are born, what the language of
butterflies is like. , among many others, reflect their
interests in learning more about the characteristics of
animals. Plants and their development process.
In early childhood, explorations, questions and
experiments with water, sand, light, darkness, wind,
air, magnets are also important; explorations of
physical and natural phenomena; These are experiences
that spark the interest of girls and boys.
Likewise, begin the exploration of
technological artifacts produced by human
beings, from experimentation with a
vessel to experimentation with devices
such as telephones and computers, which
are currently not so foreign to their daily
lives. The intention is that they can
understand how they work, how they were
made and what uses they can be given or
how they facilitate the performance of
certain activities, among others.
Girls and boys also explore their own body, what they
can do with it, the sensations of falling, swinging,
balance and imbalance, among others. They also
explore objects, being at first touched, smelled and
tasted, and as they gain autonomy in their movement,
they are used to hide and appear, build and destroy,
move away and get closer, pull and push, etc.

Classroom Project I Take

Care and Value My Body
Thus they discover the permanence of the object, its
qualities: flexibility, hardness, texture, among others
(Linares, 2004, Durán, 2012), which contributes to the
development of the processes of prediction and
anticipation of what happens to the objects when they
are manipulated.
 HOW IS IT EXPLORED?
To understand the process of exploring the environment
in early childhood, it is essential to return to two
principles of the pedagogy proposed by María
Montessori: freedom and independence. The first,
referring to the freedom to move and act, to explore in
an environment that offers an environment prepared for
this purpose, in which girls and boys make decisions.
about what to do it, with whom and how.
do,
n
wha
The second related to the independence or autonomy
to experiment, without the direction of the adult, as
well as to carry out activities on their own that allow
them to satisfy basic requirements such as eating,
dressing, grooming.
When exploring the environment, several processes
are present that must be considered, such as:

• The manipulation
• The observation
The experimentation
The verbal expression and
artistic language expression
 THE Understood as one of the
MANIPULATION: main activities in the first years
of life, which constitutes one of the ways to know
objects through all the senses: looking at them, holding
them, sucking them, throwing them, hearing them,
feeling them, etc. Through manipulation, girls and boys
act on objects with their entire body. It confronts them
with real situations such as filling and emptying,
gathering and separating, fitting, stringing, putting in
and taking out, covering and uncovering, etc., which
allow them to learn about the properties of objects and
their use, and contribute to their independence and to
control over their movements.
OBSERVATION: Refers to the action of looking at, or
listening to, objects with a certain depth and care, which
leads to identifying their characteristics, from which it is
possible to make comparisons that allow establishing
differences and similarities between objects. initially
physical such as size, color, thickness, shape, texture.
That is, build operations.
This process becomes more complex, to the extent that
other types of categories are integrated into a
framework of trial and error. As Tonucci puts it, the girl
and the boy, in a certain way, are scientists and one of
the inherent characteristics of scientific work is that we
learn about things as a consequence of the very activity
that is carried out. True learning always consists of trial
and error, a process that must always be undertaken
with the highest degree of activity of which we are
capable.
THE EXPERIMENTATION . It is related to manipulation
and observation, in which factors such as intentionality
and even the formulation of hypotheses come into play.
It is about, then, checking if what they propose happens
in the way they imagine it happens, or even what
happens if... Language, then, is fundamental in this
process, as it will allow the girl and boy to grant
meanings constructed from the action itself. In this
sense, in the experimentation with objects carried out by
girls and boys in early childhood, more than the answers
obtained, what is fundamental is the inquiry process
itself.
VERBAL EXPRESSION: All described
They are accompanied by processes
language. They have the possibility of becoming true
pedagogical activities when they ensure that girls and
boys experience meaningful interactions, both with
themselves and with their peers or with their teachers
and educational agents. Language and thought are
intertwined processes that are built and consolidated
thanks to interaction.
EXPRESSION IN ARTISTIC LANGUAGES: Through these,
girls and boys have the possibility of representing what
they have explored, the situation in which this
exploration has occurred and what they have
constructed in their thinking about what happened.