Loose parts play in Room 2

This week, I have been seeing a lot of play that involves loose parts.

In our environment, loose parts include shells, stones, marbles, craft gems, feathers, wooden coasters, different sizes of boxes, pipes, and so on...

Our children use these materials to create and lead their play on their own or often collaborate with others. These materials can be used in such different  and creative ways by children.

                       Using marbles, small tiles, little buckets in conjunction with animals

 

Children choose their own materials to play, explore and create. It provides opportunities to share ideas and negotiate with each other. Children love to make stories using animals and loose parts. 

This spontaneous creation of a castle happened earlier this week.  The children kept coming back to this construction work almost every day. Each day, they made a different type of castle using a wide range of loose parts as you can see here. This encouraged the children to share their ideas in a respectful manner. How can we share our own ideas and work together? 

One of the things that these two really enjoy is using the loose parts in the family corner, putting all of the little tiles, marbles, and gems into the pot for cooking! But they are also able to take responsibility for their own learning when it comes to tidying up and sorting all the items out. 

With loose parts, the play is fluid and endless. They can be used in so many different ways and it is up to the children to decide how they use and explore them. Often, our children want to continue working on the play, so they like to put cones around their play so that they can come back to it. I feel that this is extremely important that we respect their play and that their play is not being disturbed.