In early childhood settings, most of the day is spent on play: pouring water, building with blocks, rolling balls, watching shadows, asking “why?” over and over. It can feel far removed from topics like electricity, motion, or forces that older students meet in physics lessons.
But those playful moments are often the first steps towards the kind of thinking that physics demands later on. When children explore how the world works with their hands and senses, they start to develop habits—curiosity, observation, pattern-spotting—that will help them make sense of more formal science as teenagers.
Early years educators are in a unique position here. The environment they create, the questions they ask, and the activities they offer can gently shape how children feel about science for years to come.
Physics Starts With Everyday Experiences
For young children, physics is not a formula on a board. It is:
- The way a tower of blocks collapses
- The splash that happens when they drop a stone in a puddle
- The way a car runs faster down a steeper ramp
- The shadow that grows and shrinks throughout the day
When adults notice and name these experiences, children begin to connect language to ideas: higher, lower, faster, heavier, slower, closer, further. Over time, this “everyday physics” helps them:
- Compare and contrast (Which ball rolled further? Why?)
- Predict outcomes (What do you think will happen if we make the ramp steeper?)
- Notice cause and effect (When we add more weight, it falls quicker.)
These skills are the building blocks of later scientific thinking. Even if the word “physics” is never used, children are already experimenting with it.
The Role of Early Childhood Educators in STEM Thinking
Early childhood educators do not need to turn their classroom into a laboratory to support future science learning. Small adjustments to everyday practice can make a big difference. For example:
- Using open-ended questions
“What do you notice?” “What changed?” “How could we make that happen again?”
These questions encourage children to observe carefully and describe what they see. - Offering simple investigations
Providing ramps, different materials to roll, water trays with containers, or magnets allows children to test ideas again and again. - Valuing mistakes and surprises
When something does not work as expected, adults can frame it as a chance to learn rather than a failure: “That didn’t go how we thought. What could we try next?” - Connecting experiences to language
Introducing everyday scientific words naturally in conversation—push, pull, heavy, light, float, sink—helps children develop a vocabulary they will meet again in primary and secondary school.
In this way, early years settings become places where science is not a special event, but part of daily life.
How These Early Skills Show Up in A-Level Physics
It can be hard to imagine a three-year-old carefully pouring water as the same learner who will one day tackle A-Level physics. Yet the skills are connected.
Students who choose physics in their later teens are asked to:
- Interpret graphs and data
- Visualise forces and motion
- Break complex problems into smaller steps
- Reflect on whether their answer makes sense in the real world
These tasks are easier for young people who:
- Are used to noticing patterns (this always happens when…)
- Have practice explaining their thinking out loud
- Feel comfortable trying, adjusting, and trying again
The confidence to approach a difficult question, rather than avoid it, often grows out of many small successes and supported risks in earlier years. When educators invest in rich, hands-on experiences in early childhood, they are supporting not only early learning goals but also the mindset needed for challenging subjects like physics later on.
When Learning Becomes More Formal: Supporting Older Students
As children move through primary and secondary school, science gradually becomes more structured. They meet formal experiments, written methods, and mathematical descriptions of the world. For many students, this step feels exciting; for others, it can be overwhelming.
By the time students reach A-Level, physics requires a solid grasp of mathematics, comfort with abstract ideas, and resilience when problems do not have an obvious starting point. Some learners benefit from additional guidance at this stage. That might include:
- Regular opportunities to ask questions they did not raise in class
- Extra time spent breaking down complex exam questions
- Help linking the “real world” intuition they built as children to the formal language and equations used in advanced courses
Families and students who want focused support sometimes turn to A-Level Physics tutors. Working one-to-one or in small groups, tutors can revisit topics at the student’s pace, connect ideas across the syllabus, and help them develop clearer problem-solving strategies. This kind of targeted help builds on the curiosity and perseverance that often began in early childhood.
Practical Ways Early Years Settings Can Nurture Future Physicists
Even though A-Level physics feels very distant in a nursery or preschool setting, early childhood educators can gently encourage the kinds of thinking that will matter later:
- Create “science-rich” play areas
Include ramps, balls, cars, blocks, scales, water, sand, and loose parts. Allow children to explore freely and return to favourite activities over time. - Model noticing and wondering
Share your own observations: “I see that this car went further than the other one. I wonder why?” Children learn that it is normal to be curious. - Encourage recording in simple ways
Older early years children can draw pictures of what happened, mark how many times something rolled, or sort objects into groups. These early records are the first steps toward later data handling. - Celebrate questions as much as answers
When a child asks, “Why is the shadow gone?” or “Why did it fall?”, treat the question as valuable in itself. This attitude teaches children that their thinking is important. - Stay relaxed about “getting it right”
At this stage, the goal is not to deliver perfect scientific explanations, but to help children enjoy exploring and talking about their ideas. Accuracy will be refined later; interest and confidence need to come first.
Looking Ahead: A Continuous Learning Journey
The path from early childhood play to advanced physics is not linear, but it is connected. The child who experiments with water wheels, builds tall towers, and rolls cars down ramps is practising the same kind of exploratory thinking that underpins later science and engineering.
When early childhood educators provide rich, open-ended experiences and treat curiosity as something to be nurtured, they contribute to a long-term learning journey. Years later, as students wrestle with complex ideas in physics classrooms or with specialist support, they will draw on habits formed much earlier: noticing carefully, asking “what if?”, and staying with a problem long enough to see what happens next.