How can a toddler’s thinking be given a rich opportunity to form a relationship with loose parts?

The term loose parts were first used by Simon Nicholson (Landscape Architect) in 1971 in an article about children and outdoors play. Nicholson described loose parts as the only materials that young children need.

“In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kinds of variables in it.”

Simon Nicholson

How do toddlers use loose parts? Toddlers think with their hands. With loose parts they are able transport, transform, carry, combine, remake, attach, connect, take apart, and put back together in a variety of ways.

Toddlers make meaning of their world by using loose parts. A piece of driftwood can be a spoon to stir their magical fairy soup, a tree in their clay, a magic wand, or just a stick to carry in their pockets as a treasure from a journey. Toddlers use loose parts to figure out how things work in their life. What can this material do? What is my relationship with this material?

Loose parts give children invitations to invent, create and experiment. Children are able to make their own free choice about how to use the materials and what their hands will do with these materials. Loose parts are not predetermining toys that can only be played with in one way. A shell can be part of a mermaid’s stew, a small boat in the water, something to pour with, and something to scoop with, a snack for a whale or simply a cozy place for a stone to sleep.

Loose parts invite action and communicate meaning. Toddlers are very curious about materials that are interesting and filled with sensorial experiences like stones and sticks.

Loose parts move and so do toddlers. Loose parts must be able to move with a toddler in many ways such as small pails, buckets, bags, and purses. Toddlers learn through movement and with their whole body so materials must be able to keep up with them in their very fast paced world.

What does a material do? This is an interesting question for toddlers and loose parts. How can a toddler manipulate a material to discover how her hands work? What can her hands do with this material? These are all important questions when we work with toddlers and materials.

The 100 jars of loose parts will help us to discover the many materials that are available to toddlers. We are

hoping to discover many interesting and powerful materials for our toddlers. We hoped to be surprised.

We will show you the invitations and the messy play. Embrace the messy play!!!! We will show you our disappointments, our joys and our happy toddlers discovering how materials work. As educators we want to dig deeper into loose parts and how do children use them and what are they thinking. Can we understand fully what children are thinking about, when they use these materials, when they have very little language? We will depend on our photographs to analyze the thinking of our amazing toddlers.

Heather Jackson

March 2019