“The Cold Wind Makes Different Colors”: What Children’s Theories Reveal About Scientific Thinking

There is something about walking with children that changes what we notice. Adults may walk beneath a canopy of changing leaves and recognize the familiar arrival of fall. We know what happens next. The colors will deepen, the leaves will fall, the branches will become bare, and another season will take their place.

Children may encounter the same landscape differently.

During one of our daily walks, Armen looked toward the trees and excitedly announced, “I see colors on trees.”

Mariana looked at him and offered an explanation: “Is because the wind is cold and it makes different colors.”

I have returned to Mariana’s words many times.

She did not ask me why the leaves were changing color. She did not wait for an adult to provide an explanation. She observed something happening in the natural world and constructed a theory about why it was happening.

The wind was cold.

The leaves were changing.

Perhaps one caused the other.

It would be easy to hear Mariana’s explanation and focus on what she did not yet know. We know that cold wind does not simply paint leaves yellow, orange, crimson, and brown. An adult could immediately explain chlorophyll, changes in daylight, temperature, pigments, and the biological processes involved in seasonal color change.

We could give Mariana the scientifically accepted answer.

But if our first response is correction, we may miss something far more interesting.

Mariana was already doing intellectual work.

She had observed two changes in her environment. The weather was becoming colder, and the leaves were changing color. She connected those observations and constructed a possible causal relationship between them. Her explanation emerged from the evidence available to her.

This is not an absence of scientific thinking.

It is the beginning of it.

Research on children’s causal learning helps us recognize the sophistication of this process. Young children actively seek explanations for how the world works, construct causal explanations of their own, and use exploration to gather information that can confirm, challenge, or transform those explanations. Explanation and exploration can work together as children generate and evaluate hypotheses about the world around them.

Mariana did not possess the scientific explanation for autumn leaf color, but she was participating in a process at the heart of scientific thinking: observing a phenomenon, noticing a relationship, and proposing a cause.

Her theory mattered even if her explanation was not scientifically accurate.

This is where adults face an interesting challenge.

We know things children do not know. Our knowledge can be useful. It can also make listening difficult.

When we recognize that a child’s explanation differs from the accepted scientific explanation, we may feel responsible for correcting it. We might find a book about leaves, introduce vocabulary, explain photosynthesis, or design an activity intended to teach the science behind autumn colors.

There is nothing inherently wrong with sharing knowledge with children. The question is not whether adults should ever provide information. The question is when.

What becomes possible when we allow a child’s theory to remain visible long enough for us to understand it?

Instead of immediately explaining why leaves change color, we might wonder what led Mariana to connect cold wind with changing leaves. Has she noticed that the weather and the trees change at approximately the same time? Does she believe wind causes other changes in nature? Would her theory change if she encountered leaves changing color during warm weather? What other evidence might she notice?

We do not need to ask every one of these questions aloud. They can become questions that guide our observation.

They help us shift from asking, “How do I teach Mariana why leaves change color?” to asking, “What is Mariana trying to understand?”

That is a very different place from which to teach.

I am cautious when adults describe children’s theories as guesses.

A guess can sound arbitrary, as though the child selected an answer without reasoning. Children’s theories often contain something much richer. They emerge from observation, prior experiences, conversations, imagination, relationships, and the information children have gathered about how their world works.

Mariana had evidence.

The air felt colder.

The wind had changed.

The leaves looked different.

She connected those experiences.

Research on causal reasoning suggests that young children are remarkably interested in the underlying causes of events. They seek causal information from adults, construct explanations, and continue searching when the information they receive does not adequately explain what they want to know. Their questions and explanations are part of an active effort to understand why things happen.

When we recognize this, the child’s explanation stops being something we need to eliminate.

It becomes something we can investigate.

The walk did not have to become a lesson about why leaves change color. Instead, the leaves themselves became part of the learning ecosystem.

We collected leaves and created opportunities for children to encounter them again. Near the light table, we placed leaves against a dark background and separated some of them by type and color. Children could look closely, compare, arrange, move, and combine them.

Lany became fascinated with arranging the leaves. She placed maple leaves in a line and later reorganized them into a circle. As more leaves became available, her arrangements became increasingly complex.

The children were no longer only looking at leaves on trees. They could hold them, turn them, compare their edges, notice differences in size, study their colors, create patterns, and place one beside another.

The leaves had become materials for thinking.

Over several days, we expanded the possibilities. Oak leaves of different sizes were introduced. Later, ginkgo and small maple leaves joined the collection. Frames and wood tiles provided spaces where children could create temporary arrangements. The children described colors, noticed shapes, reorganized compositions, and returned to the materials again.

Something important was happening.

The original encounter with the changing trees had not ended.

It was being revisited.

One of the most compelling moments came after Tomas completed a particularly complex arrangement of leaves. Nearby was a photograph showing a cluster of trees.

Tomas looked at his arrangement and then at the photograph.

“I can see how all these leaves work together like they do in nature,” he said.

His words revealed another transformation.

The leaves were no longer simply individual objects he could arrange. His representation allowed him to notice a relationship between the parts he had placed together and the larger organization he observed in nature.

He had created something and then used what he created to see something differently.

This is one reason representation matters so deeply in children’s learning. Drawing, constructing, arranging, sculpting, storytelling, movement, and other forms of representation are not merely ways for children to demonstrate what they already know. Representation can become part of the thinking process itself.

Children make an idea visible, encounter it differently, and sometimes discover something they had not noticed before.

Tomas’s arrangement became a way of thinking about trees.

This is where the experience becomes especially significant through the lens of Revisiting Journeys.

The children did not have one encounter with autumn leaves and move on to the next topic. An observation made outdoors traveled into another context. Leaves moved from trees into children’s hands and into arrangements and representations. Ideas moved with them.

The learning did not follow a straight line from adult question to child answer.

It unfolded.

Armen noticed color.

Mariana constructed a causal explanation.

Lany investigated arrangement, pattern, and composition.

Tomas connected a representation back to the organization of leaves in nature.

Each encounter created another possibility for thinking.

This is what can happen when we resist turning children’s observations into predetermined activities and instead create conditions in which ideas can be encountered again.

Revisiting does not mean repeating the same experience.

It means returning with the possibility of seeing differently.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if, immediately after Mariana said that the cold wind made the leaves change color, I had stopped the conversation and explained the science.

She might have learned a new fact.

But what might we have failed to learn about her?

We might never have noticed the causal relationship she was constructing between weather and color. We might have replaced her question before fully understanding it. We might have unintentionally communicated that knowledge lives primarily with adults and that the child’s role is to receive it.

The alternative is not to withhold knowledge indefinitely or romanticize explanations that are scientifically inaccurate. Children deserve access to knowledge.

But they also deserve time to think.

There is a profound difference between introducing information into an ongoing investigation and using information to close one.

The first expands possibilities.

The second can end them.

Children’s theories are not meant to remain unchanged.

Scientific thinking itself depends on revision.

Research has found that information inconsistent with children’s prior knowledge can be especially powerful in prompting causal explanations. When something does not behave as expected, children have reason to reconsider what they thought they knew and construct another explanation.

Imagine, then, where Mariana’s theory might travel.

What happens if she notices leaves changing color on a day when the wind is warm? What happens if some leaves remain green while others on the same tree become yellow? What if she notices that leaves sheltered from the wind also change color?

Those encounters do not need to become adult-designed tests of whether Mariana is correct.

They are possibilities for noticing.

New evidence can create productive tension between what a child believes and what the child observes. That tension can lead to another question, another representation, another conversation, or another theory.

This is why documenting children’s words matters.

Imagine returning later to Mariana’s original statement: “Is because the wind is cold and it makes different colors.”

Would she still agree?

What would she add?

What would she change?

What would she now notice that she did not notice before?

The transformation between those moments is learning.

Scientific thinking in early childhood does not begin when an adult introduces a science lesson. It begins when children notice that something has changed and wonder why. It appears when they connect two events, propose an explanation, compare possibilities, test an idea through action, encounter something unexpected, and reconsider what they thought they knew.

Sometimes it begins with a statement that an adult knows is scientifically inaccurate.

“The cold wind makes different colors.”

If we listen only for correctness, we hear an error.

If we listen for thinking, we hear a theory.

That distinction changes everything.

It changes the questions we ask. It changes the environments we create. It changes how quickly we intervene. It changes what we document. Most importantly, it changes how we see the child.

The child is no longer waiting for science to begin.

The child is already investigating the world.

The next time a child offers an explanation that you know is not scientifically accurate, notice what happens inside you. Do you immediately begin constructing the correct explanation? Do you search for the right vocabulary? Do you feel responsible for making sure the child leaves the conversation with the correct information?

Before you answer, become curious.

What did the child observe?

What experiences might have contributed to the explanation?

What connections is the child making?

What evidence seems important to the child?

What might happen if the idea had time to travel?

Write down the child’s words exactly as they were spoken. Preserve the theory. Then look for opportunities for the child to encounter the idea again through materials, experiences, conversation, representation, and time.

You may eventually share what you know.

But first, discover what the child knows.

Because when Mariana told us that the cold wind makes different colors, she was not waiting for scientific thinking to begin.

She was already doing it.

The Chronicles of Children’s Thinking will continue to include two free articles each month, because I want these stories and ideas to remain accessible to educators.

For readers who want to take the thinking from the Chronicle into their own practice, I now offer a paid membership that includes a Reflective Card accompanying each Chronicle. Each card offers questions and invitations to help you pause, reflect, revisit your observations, and consider children’s ideas from different perspectives.

The Chronicle tells the story.
The Reflective Card invites you to bring the thinking into your own learning ecosystem.

If you would like to go deeper with each Chronicle, I invite you to become a paid member and receive the accompanying Reflective Cards.

Legare, C. H., & Lombrozo, T. (2014). Selective effects of explanation on learning during early childhood. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 126, 198–212.

Legare, C. H., Gelman, S. A., & Wellman, H. M. (2010). Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children’s causal explanatory reasoning. Child Development, 81(3), 929–944. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01443.x

Leave a comment

Share