Loose Parts Play - Think out of the box

Loose-parts play theory is gaining widespread popularity in early years settings across the UK, but different settings seem to have very different ideas on exactly what it involves. What resources constitute ‘loose parts’ can sometimes lead to confusion.

Some practitioners define loose parts as exclusively natural resources, such as branches and twigs, while others incorporate recycled items such as pipes, tubes and scrap materials. Some settings provide bowls of beads and coloured stones for loose-parts play, while in some instances settings have been advised to get rid of their metal toy cars or plastic toys because they are not ‘loose parts’.

In fact, loose-parts theory is less about the individual resources and much more about what children do with them. The original theory, proposed by Simon Nicholson in 1971, simply states that in any environment, ‘the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it’. In short, any resource or environment that offers multiple possibilities (or variables) has intrinsically greater play value and contributes more to the development of creativity and imagination (see box, overleaf).