Children are natural scientists. They do what scientists do, but perhaps for some slightly different and less conscious reasons. They are anxious to understand the world just as adults are. There is a terribly interesting, but rather confusing, world full of stimuli all around them. Many adults, however, have learned to ignore some of that world rather than investigate it.
Young children ignore very little.
They are willing to look and to inquire about the world. This is not the idealized world of scientific theories, principles, and models, nor is it the precise world of the laboratory. Children draw their understanding from the messy world around them. As they explore, children organize what's around them, building their own schemes and structures and conceptions. We have lots of research as well as anecdotal evidence of this.