Hello Roots Parents! This week we will be sharing a variety of activities on our blog that incorporate the use of 'loose parts' from inside and outside your home into play and learning. Your child most likely already plays and invents with a variety of household and natural objects such as boxes, cardboard tubes, sticks, and rocks. Below are some of the benefits and ideas to further support their exploration.
What are Loose Parts?
- Miscellaneous natural materials and everyday objects that inspire inquiry, invention, and imagination are known to educators as "loose parts"
- Unlike toys or tools with specific uses, loose parts are open-ended materials that provide endless possibilities to children
- Children can move and manipulate the materials in any way imaginable. The object’s use can change each day or even multiple times within an hour
Why Are Loose Parts Important?
- When children have access to flexible and open-ended materials, they use:
- Problem solving
- Creativity
- Imagination
- Ingenuity
- The Scientific Process
- Math Skills
- Symbolic Thinking
- Critical Thinking
At Roots, the forest is our primary source of loose parts.
The children make use of pine cones, pine needles, branches, sticks,
seeds, bark, and lichen they find all around them.
We use log rounds and tree cookies for building, stacking, sitting, rolling,
climbing, and anything else we can think of. - To continue the learning and creation process at home,
make loose parts available to your child in ways that are easy, fun, and FREE!
- Cardboard
- Packing materials
- Plastic caps
- Egg cartons
- Recyclables
- Ice frozen in different containers
- Corks
- Rocks
- Shells
- Sticks
- Leaves
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