In brief
- The Curiosity Approach prioritises awe and wonder over plastic toys: Inspired by pioneers like Montessori and Reggio Emilia, this pedagogy replaces structured, synthetic resources with open-ended materials and “loose parts” to spark a child’s natural inquisitiveness.
- Environments act as a “third teacher” to inspire exploration: By using natural materials, recycled items, and neutral tones, nurseries create calm, stimulating spaces that encourage children to investigate, experiment, and lead their own learning journeys.
- Child-led enquiry builds essential life skills: Moving away from adult-dictated activities allows children to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and independence as they pursue their own questions at their own pace.
- Streamlined admin creates more time for “in the moment” teaching: Using digital tools to handle nursery operations frees up practitioners to act as facilitators, allowing them to focus on crafting engaging environments and documenting meaningful developmental milestones.
The Curiosity Approach is a child-led, play-based method founded by Lyndsey Hellyn and Stephanie Bennett in 2017. It places curiosity, creativity, and wonder at the centre of early learning, encouraging children to explore open-ended resources and natural materials rather than plastic toys with a single fixed purpose.
The Curiosity Approach draws on the teachings of early years pioneers, including Maria Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Rudolf Steiner, and Emmi Pikler.
Stephanie Bennett describes it as “a beautiful recipe book of the teachings of all the great early years pioneers”, and it’s been adapted for the realities of 21st-century early childhood education. For a deeper look at one of those foundations, see our guide to the history of the Montessori framework.
For nursery practitioners, The Curiosity Approach is both a philosophy and a practical framework. It shapes how you set up your environment, choose your resources, and position yourself as a facilitator rather than a director of play.
This guide covers what the Curiosity Approach means in practice, how it links to the EYFS framework, five ideas for implementing it in your nursery, and a dedicated section on curiosity tuff tray ideas to help you get started.
Benefits of the Curiosity Approach
The Curiosity Approach offers clear benefits for children, practitioners, and parents and carers alike.
- For children: it builds independence, concentration, problem-solving, language, and confidence. Open-ended resources encourage children to test ideas, make choices, and explain their thinking, rather than waiting for an adult to tell them what something is for.
- For practitioners: it creates richer opportunities to observe learning as it happens. You can see how children think, negotiate, explore, and communicate, which makes planning more responsive and more meaningful.
- For parents and carers: it creates a calmer, more intentional nursery experience. Children often come home with stronger stories to tell because their day has given them room to wonder, question, and create.
The biggest shift is cultural. The Curiosity Approach helps settings move towards a model where children do more of the thinking, and adults do more of the watching, listening, and extending.
How the Curiosity Approach links to EYFS
The Curiosity Approach isn’t a separate framework sitting alongside EYFS, it fits directly within it. The EYFS statutory framework states that “children learn by leading their own play,” which is the central principle of the Curiosity Approach.
The strongest alignment is with the three characteristics of effective teaching and learning, which the EYFS framework sets out as:
- Playing and exploring: children investigate and experience things, and “have a go.”
- Active learning: children concentrate and keep on trying even when they encounter difficulties, and enjoy their achievements.
- Creating and thinking critically: children have and develop their own ideas, make links between them, and develop strategies for doing things.
Each of these characteristics is actively supported by a Curiosity Approach environment. When children are given open-ended resources, calm spaces, and adults who facilitate rather than direct, they naturally play, persist, and think critically.
The approach also supports the EYFS principle of enabling environments – the idea that the learning space itself should be part of the teaching. Neutral tones, natural textures, and carefully chosen resources create an environment that invites deep exploration rather than overwhelming children with stimulation.
For a broader view of how the EYFS framework organises learning, see our complete guide to the 7 areas of learning in EYFS.
What age is the Curiosity Approach for?
The Curiosity Approach is designed for children from birth to five, making it a natural fit for nurseries, preschools, and reception settings. Its strongest application is in the early years, where child-led, play-based learning has the greatest developmental impact.
Younger children – from babies through to toddlers – benefit from the sensory richness of authentic resources: the weight of a wooden spoon, the texture of a pine cone, the sound of dried beans in a tin. These experiences build neural connections that plastic toys simply can’t replicate.
For children aged three to five, the approach supports the EYFS milestones around language, critical thinking, and independent exploration. Open-ended resources give this age group the freedom to assign their own meaning to objects, build narratives, and test ideas , all skills that communication and language development research consistently links to school readiness.
Key principle: the Curiosity Approach isn’t about removing structure entirely. It’s about shifting the balance , giving children more agency over how they play, and ensuring the environment supports that agency rather than directing it.
5 Curiosity Approach ideas for your nursery
These five ideas are practical starting points for bringing the Curiosity Approach into your setting. None of them requires expensive resources or a full room overhaul – they’re about shifting how you think about provision and your role within it.
1. Create a stimulating, calm environment
Start with the space itself. Curiosity Approach settings favour neutral tones, natural textures, and uncluttered areas that let children focus on the resources rather than the décor. Swap bright plastic storage for wooden crates or wicker baskets. Bring in natural materials – leaves, stones, shells, bark – and make them accessible at children’s eye level.
The goal is an environment that invites exploration rather than directing it. When children walk in and see open-ended resources waiting for them, they begin to play before you’ve said a word.
2. Encourage child-led learning
Step back from planning every activity. Instead, observe what children are drawn to and follow their lead. If a child is fascinated by pouring and filling, extend that interest rather than redirecting it. Offer new containers, different materials, or a question that deepens the investigation.
This is what the EYFS means by playing and exploring. Children who choose their own direction tend to concentrate longer, persist through challenges, and develop stronger independent thinking. Read more about the value of role play in the early years as one of the richest forms of child-led learning.
3. Foster enquiry-based learning
Introduce questions, objects, or scenarios that prompt children to investigate. A chrysalis in a jar or a collection of seeds in different sizes can all prompt children to think deeply.
The adult role here is to ask open questions rather than provide answers. “What do you think will happen?” and “How could we find out?” are more powerful than any explanation you could give.
4. Incorporate play-based learning throughout the day
Play isn’t a break from learning in the Curiosity Approach – it is the learning. Every transition, routine, and activity is an opportunity for children to explore, experiment, and make meaning. Snack time becomes a chance to practise language and self-care. Tidy-up time becomes sorting and categorising.
The more you treat play as the primary vehicle for development, the more purposeful your provision becomes.
5. Promote collaborative learning
Set up spaces that naturally invite more than one child to engage. A large loose-parts tray, a shared water wall, or an art table with enough materials for a small group all encourage children to negotiate, communicate, and build together.
Collaboration at this age isn’t just social – it’s deeply cognitive. Children challenge each other’s thinking, introduce new vocabulary, and extend each other’s play in ways adults often can’t.
How eyworks supports Curiosity Approach settings
The Curiosity Approach depends on intentional observation. When children are leading their own play, the most valuable thing a practitioner can do is watch, document, and respond. That requires a system that makes observation quick and effortless, not a burden that pulls you away from the children.
With eylog, practitioners can capture observations in the moment, such as a photo of a child absorbed in a heuristic tray with a note on the language they used during a loose-parts investigation, and then link them directly to EYFS areas of learning the same day. No end-of-day scramble. No relying on memory.
The evidence that you add with eylog builds into a rich picture of each child’s learning journey. It helps you spot patterns, plan responsive next steps, and share meaningful updates with parents and carers – strengthening the home learning environment that the Curiosity Approach depends on.
For nursery managers, eyworks brings observations, EYFS tracking, and parent communication into one platform. It gives you the operational foundation to run a Curiosity Approach setting with confidence, knowing the evidence is there when you need it.
Find out why online learning journals are essential for modern early years settings, or book a free demo to see how eyworks supports child-led learning environments like yours.
Curiosity tuff tray ideas
Tuff trays are one of the most versatile resources in an early years setting – but in a Curiosity Approach context, they work differently from a typical themed activity tray, so deserve their own focus to help you utilise The Curiosity Approach effectively. The guiding principle, as the Curiosity Approach’s own guidance puts it, is: less is more.
The more an adult designs and fills a tray, the less room there is for children to follow their own thinking. A tray crammed with themed props tells children what to do before they’ve had a chance to wonder. A simpler tray, with carefully chosen open-ended resources, invites genuine curiosity.
The rule of thumb: if your tuff tray took more than five minutes to set up, it’s probably doing too much of the thinking for the children.
What makes a good Curiosity Approach tuff tray?
- Open-ended resources that can be used in multiple ways: loose parts, natural materials, authentic household objects
- Minimal theming. Follow how children play (pouring, transporting, mixing, investigating) rather than locking them into a predetermined narrative
- Space to move resources – children should be able to transport, rearrange, and combine materials freely
- Sensory variety – different textures, weights, and sounds within a single tray
8 curiosity tuff tray ideas to try
- Natural treasures tray: fill with autumnal finds: conkers, acorns, pine cones, seed pods, and smooth stones. Add small containers and wooden scoops. No instructions needed.
- Heuristic play tray: authentic household objects: stainless steel cups, wooden spoons, keys, small tins, fabric scraps. Let children explore independently.
- Sand and loose parts: plain sand with old picture frames, house number tiles, and small wooden blocks. Children use them to mark, sort, and build.
- Water and tubing: a shallow water tray with lengths of tubing, funnels, and small world animals. Simple cause-and-effect exploration.
- Mixing colours: shallow trays with primary colour paints, brushes, rollers, and decorating tools. Focus on the process, not the outcome.
- Chalk and tools: chalk pieces alongside hammers, graters, and brushes. Children crush, draw, and investigate texture and mark-making.
- Seasonal nature tray: change with the seasons: spring blossom and mud, summer grass and pebbles, winter frost and bare twigs. Connect children to the natural world outside.
- Loose parts and small world: a branch, some tubing, small world animals, and a handful of stones. No narrative imposed – children build their own.
The key across all of these is restraint. Offer fewer things, give children longer, and resist the urge to redirect. The richest play often emerges from the simplest invitations.
If you’re looking for more tuff tray ideas, we’ve got 5 tuff tray ideas perfect for summer.
Ready to build a Curiosity Approach setting?
The Curiosity Approach is a shift in how you think about children, provision, and your role as a practitioner. The settings that do it well aren’t necessarily the ones with the most natural materials, they’re the ones where adults have genuinely stepped back, created space for children to lead, and built systems that let them observe and respond without the admin getting in the way.
If you’re ready to build that kind of setting, eyworks gives you the operational foundation to make it work. From in-the-moment observations linked to EYFS areas of learning, to parent updates that extend the Curiosity Approach into the home, to reporting that keeps you Ofsted-ready without the paperwork pile – it’s all in one place.
Book a free demo to see how eyworks supports child-led learning environments, or explore the full nursery management software to see everything eyworks can do for your setting.