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!

Gabon is a country in central Africa on the Equator, which is bordered by Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo, as well as the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Guinea. Let’s learn more.

Gabon Facts

Gabon has an area of 100,000 square miles, or 270,000 square kilometers and is home to about 2.3 million people. The capital and largest city is Libreville. Almost 90 percent of the land of Gabon is forest, and the nation has huge biodiversity.

The original inhabitants of Gabon were Bambenga, and the Kingdom of Orungu was established there in the 1700s, and France colonized the area in the later 19th century. Gabon gained its independence in 1960.

The official language is French and about 95 percent of the population is part of the Bantu ethnic groups. The majority of people are Christian.

Gabon comes from the Portuguese word gabao, which means hooded cloak. Portuguese explorers in the 1470s used the term to refer to the Komo river estuary, which they said resembled a cloak. Eventually the name spread to cover the whole region.

Gabon is a presidential republic with a legislature, though there have been many disputed elections and, in 2023, a military coup.

Gabon National Symbols

The Gabon flag consists of three horizontal stripes, in green, yellow and blue. The flag was adopted in 1960.

The national anthem is “La Concorde,” and it was written and adopted in 1960 as well.

The coat of arms features a ship on a shield with the same colors as the flag, with three yellow circles in the green section. Above the crest is a large tree, and the crest is flanked by black panthers. The motto, which translated to English is “unity, work, justice,” is below the shield, among the roots of the tree. The slogan that translates to “we shall go forward together” hang around the tree.

I couldn’t find any official national animals or plants, but black panthers are considered a national symbol because of their use on the coat of arms.

Gabon Learning Activities

Did you know black panthers aren’t a distinct species? In Africa they are leopards, but in other areas black panthers are actually cheetahs, bobcats, lynx or other big cats. Learn more about the animals of Gabon at A to Z Animals.

Check out Monts de Cristal, or the Crystal Mountains, home to a large diversity of wildlife (including lots of butterflies) and a large national park. There’s lots of great pictures on that page.

Adventures in a Messy Life has a little Gabon unit study that includes links to some videos, a recipe for African beignets, and notebooking pages available for purchase that you can use for any country in Africa.

Check out this video with interesting facts about Gabon from The African Script.

Find more resources for teaching about Gabon at Teachers Pay Teachers.

Learn more about traditional foods in Gabon from Chef’s Pencil, and check out this recipe for what’s considered the national dish of Gabon, poulet Nyembwe, a chicken dish made with red palm oil (which is what the dish is named for).

Have you read?

Gabon Facts

Gabon National Symbols

Gabon Learning Activities

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