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Loose Parts

We recognise that children need space and time to invent, trial, evaluate, and modify their own constructions and ideas through open-ended play. Loose Parts Play enables this by giving the children the space and time to play freely with a variety of resources that ensure limitless possibilities. We now offer Loose Parts Play at Lunch time. The resources that are available to the children are everything and anything and the more choice and variety the better. They can include: tyres, planks and stumps of wood, pallets, material, rope, wool and string, packaging, tarpaulins, cardboard tubes and boxes of all sizes, guttering, buckets, tins, sticks, water, bricks, seat belts, crates, wheelbarrows, suitcases, shells, pine cones, mud and sand and basically any interesting, randomly found, objects. The list is endless and so are the possibilities.

“When children play with loose parts, they enter a world of ‘what if’ that promotes the type of thinking that leads to problem solving and theoretical reasoning. Loose parts enhance children’s ability to think imaginatively and see solutions, and they bring a sense of adventure and excitement to children’s play

(Daly and Beloglovsky, 2015)