Loose Parts Play Ideas

This time of year I get to thinking about spring cleaning, and whether it’s at home or in a classroom, one of the great things to do as the seasons change is to change out centers or materials that kids have access to for creative play and learning.

Having seasonal sensory activities is a lot of fun for kids (and I always had fun doing different sensory boxes for holidays and seasons, too), and one of the easiest ways to change up your offerings is through the use of loose parts.

What are loose parts? They’re basically any little thing that you can collect that kids can play with in lots of different ways.

Things like buttons, coins, washers, beads, plastic jewels, those little counter teddy bears, plastic tokens, rocks, pompoms, just to name a few. My daughter’s preschool had a whole box of old keys.

You can buy loose parts or collect them from around the house or classroom, but of course you can use natural materials as loose parts, too. We used seashells a lot because we have a ton of them. This post from My Teaching Cupboard talks all about natural loose parts and how to use them.

Community Playthings also has a post about natural loose parts and ideas for using them with math activities such as counting and making shapes and patterns. 

Why would you want to use loose parts at home or in the classroom? They encourage open ended thinking and creativity, putting things together, experimentation and investigation. In group settings they encourage creative play and working together. They can be used for math, language and art purposes, and they’re fun for kids and adults to tinker with. Picklebums has a good post on the why and how of loose parts with more good ideas of items you can collect.

Our Playful Learning Journey has easy loose parts ideas for using plastic gems and buttons, including with playdough or doing color sorting on a hundreds board (which looks so pretty I kind of want to play with it).

I love small parts for small world play situations, like gathering a little tube of ocean animals with some blue fabric, blue glass gems and other small items so kids can make up their own little world. Play Learn Inspire has a great list of these kinds of ideas, plus some even easier ones like magnets and stringing things.

And if you’re wondering how in the world you’ll store all these little bits, Cultivating Confidence has some great ideas.

I’ve shared a lot of loose parts ideas on my blog through the years, most recently this loose parts mandala project, which is as simple as gathering some loose parts and a shape to build off of.

Do you use loose parts in your playful learning at home or at school? I’d love to hear about it!