Defining Loose Parts takes center stage in this Playvolution HQ Podcast episode. Jeff breaks down Simon Nicholson’s Theory of Loose Parts, highlighting how versatile materials inspire creativity, exploration, and open-ended play. He also examines why educational toys often fall short and shares why loose parts are a better investment for play-rich environments. And, in a random twist, Jeff reflects on his recent deep dive into bagpipe music.

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0003 Defining Loose Parts

Episode Notes

• The Theory Of Loose Parts
• The Theory Of Loose Parts | Quote 01913
• Simon Nicholson
• Loose Parts Articles
• Loose Parts Ideas
• Loose Parts Handout
• 8 Eye-Opening Reasons Young Children Are Messy

The Defining Loose Parts Transcript

Welcome to Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for pushing play. I’m Jeff Johnson.

On with the show. First up, bagpipes. I’ve been listening to a lot of bagpipe music lately.

I didn’t know where there are so many bagpipe tunes and playlists and artists on Spotify, but I’ve been digging into them. I guess get a hold of me if you wanna, if you’re a big bagpipe music fan and have somebody you wanna recommend, get a hold of me, let me know what you think. I’ve listened to more bagpipe music in the last couple of weeks than I have in my entire life, for what it’s worth.

Probably not much. First, topic one, our continuing series of core value. So core value, part three, is that play environments are not enhanced by educational toys, educational toys.

So what I’m talking about when I say educational toys, I’m talking about things like this and this. These things are lacking in a truly play environment, and we buy them with good intentions, but they really don’t measure up to other things that we could be providing kids. First off, they have fixed functionality.

It’s very limited. They have a very limited scope of what they can do. This thing, you read through the little picture book and you push the buttons and you flip the things around and you put the little shapes in the right holes and you spin the dial, and then you’re pretty much done with it.

Kids get bored with this stuff very quickly because it’s very limited in its functionality. Also, the focus of these products is on outcome over process. They want you to learn letters or learn colors or learn numbers or whatever it is, and that’s their main focus, and that is baked into them to the extent that these products have very, it’s very hard for a child to use them in a different way because they are so locked in to that function.

And we, in a play-based environment, play-thinking people, are more often, not more often, just about always more focused on the process over the finished product, the outcome. It’s the doing of the thing where the learning is, and educational toys don’t measure up to that mark. And then finally, there are poor investment of resources.

For the 20, 30, 40, 50, $150, you’re gonna spend on some learning toys for your early learning environment. You could buy more paint and more construction paper and things like that, more consumable supplies. You could build a bigger collection of loose parts, which we’ll get into in a moment.

And so, really, the payoff for those kind of things isn’t, I mean, it’s just not there. And so, parents might like to see them. You might think these things are a good thing to have in your program, but they really are lacking for those three primary reasons when it comes to early learning.

On to topic two, defining loose parts. Now, this is a big thing where loose parts are gonna come up a lot on this show, but I wanted to start out with a very, well, the definition of what a loose part is in an early episode here, so we’ve got a foundation to build on with future episodes. So, when it comes to defining loose parts, a couple things you should know.

One is, Simon Nicholson is really the go-to guy here. Now, the term loose parts was around before Simon, but he kind of brought it to the forefront and his work kind of opened up the idea to early learning. Actually, quite long after he passed away and after his original work, loose parts have been kind of an early learning term for 15, 20, 25 years now, but before that, it wasn’t a buzzword kind of the way it is now.

So, Nicholson wrote an article in 1971. It’s about a five-page article in, what was it? Landscape Architecture or Architectural Landscape. It was an architecture magazine, and the article is called How Not to Cheat Children, The Theory of Loose Parts.

And like I said, it’s about a five-page article. There’s a link to it, of course, in the episode notes. And then, a few years later, later on in the 70s, another version of this article came out called The Theory of Loose Parts, and this is kind of a expanded version of it which was geared more towards educators, and that version of the article is also available on the episode notes.

But the thing is, those very short articles summed the definition of loose parts up into one sentence, and that’s this, in any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity and the possibility of discovery are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it. So what Nicholson is really saying there is that loose parts are variables in an environment which can be interacted with. And the degree and inventiveness and creativity that comes from those are proportional to the kinds of variables in it.

So we want an environment with lots of variables, lots of things kids can interact with. So this is a loose part, and this is a loose part, and we’ll talk about it later. This is a loose part, and this is a loose part.

Anything that kids can interact with in the environment is technically a loose part. Now, some loose parts are more loose than others. Those educational toys I mentioned earlier are technically loose parts.

There’s variables that can be put in an environment that kids can interact with. But the problem with them is that they are not as loose as, say, a cardboard box, because they have that limited functionality. Because there’s so much adult outcome attempted to be designed into them that there isn’t a whole lot of flexibility for the way kids use them.

Now, kids, creative kids, kids who have lots of experience as players and creative thinkers can figure out different ways to use those things. The little thing with the keyboard on it might become the launch control for a spaceship or something like that. So those things can be used in variable ways, but because there’s so much planning that goes into them ahead of time, they really do lose a lot of the potential there.

Just about everything is a loose part, and not all loose parts are as loose as other loose parts. And sometimes adults go to great effort to make loose parts less loose. For example, if you have one right way to go down the slide on your playground, that slide isn’t as big a loose part as it would be if you let kids use the slide as they see fit.

So there’s a lot discussed here when it comes to loose parts. We will come back to that, to it over and over again. But I wanted to get you this basic definition.

In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity and the possibility of discovery are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it. That’s Simon Nicholson’s definition of loose parts. And in the future, we will build from there.

Next up, topic three. Eight eye-opening reasons young children are messy. So this is based on an article I put together at the Playvolution HQ site.

Again, link in the episode notes. And this, I wanted to have this in this episode because the thing is, if you really kind of start embracing loose parts, there’s a chance the program space is going to get messier because kids are being creative and they’re doing things with materials and they’re using their own ideas and they’re being inventive. And that can lead to a mess for kind of these eight reasons.

And look, adults tend to shy away from messy because kids aren’t so great at helping clean up. And we have limited time. And so we figure if we don’t get messy, then we don’t have to clean up the mess.

And life is a little bit easier. And I totally get that. I’ve had that framing of this myself.

But when you look at these reasons kids do, the kids are messy, you can kind of see there’s a reason for it. So we’ll jump into this introductory sentence. Young children are messy and you should find a way to embrace it.

And that’s really the takeaway from this article. Embracing the fact that young children are messy is about understanding their current developmental shortcomings and recognizing the developmental value in their sloppy, disordered, grimy actions. There’s some drill painting, one of my favorite loose parts activities with kids.

We’ll probably talk more about that later. So those eight ideas is one, kids are messy because they enjoy sensory experiences. And because they don’t suffer from the, don’t suffer from, oh, my brain froze for a minute.

They don’t suffer from our adult tendency to be bored with things after we have experienced them a couple hundred times because the world is so fresh and new to them. They really enjoy those sensory experiences. And so they go full body with them.

Look at this little guy having a very deep sensory experience with the slipperiness of purple paint back and forth and back and forth as his hands go on the stuff. They just enjoy the sensory activity. And so they don’t think about the mess.

They don’t think about I’m getting messy because I’m enjoying this mud so much or this finger painting so much. Next up is developing muscle strength and control. So one of the reasons kids are messy is because they don’t have the muscle strength and control to not be messy yet.

They are still developing those strengths and skills. And so the way they develop them is to make a whole bunch of messes until they have the muscle strength and control and good proprioception and vestibular sense and things like that. A good hand-eye coordination, for example.

And then it’s easier to be not messy when you have control of your body, when your body is fully functioning and wired together well. And that just isn’t the case for young children. Next up is the drive to explore.

So kids wanna explore. They’re doers of things. They wanna get out in the world and those hands-on experiences are often messy because kids don’t have the physiological control over their bodies to be not messy while they’re exploring.

There’s another fun one we did. That’s just unrolling bathroom tissue with a vacuum cleaner. Good times.

That was at a play event I did years and years ago. Next one is learning through trial and error. So kids need to do things.

They need to do them over and over again and they need to make mistakes. And of course, those mistakes are gonna get messy at times. So there’s gonna be food all over the floor and walls and their hair and maybe the walls when a young child is, for example, learning to feed themselves.

So trial and error can be messy. They have a limited awareness of cleanliness. If you’re two and somebody’s telling you not to make a mess, you don’t know what the, oh, I’m not gonna cuss in this podcast, you don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.

You don’t know what messy is. That’s kind of a cultural thing that you have to become acclimated to. And so talking to very young children, especially about cleanliness and messes, that’s language they haven’t acquired yet and they don’t have a real deep understanding.

And then look, one person’s expectations of cleanliness and another’s might be two radically different things. Next up is in the moment existence. And all of these other things have kind of referred to this, but kids are right here and right now in the moment.

Like I kind of mentioned, we as caregivers should try to be in the last episode. So they’re gonna be focusing on what they’re doing right now, not the mess that’s gonna be the result of it or the time it’s gonna take to clean it up. Again, they are focused on the process, not the finished product, which is often messy.

And so they’re in the moment existence is really where they’re learning, but it’s also one of the reasons they’re making messes while they’re doing it. Limited impulse control. Some of us don’t grow out of this.

Some of us, it takes a long time, but kids, they do have very limited impulse control. And so they’re gonna try things. They’re gonna suddenly dump buckets of blocks and drop food off of their plate and the high chair and those kinds of things.

So that limited impulse control adds to their messiness. And it’s something until they grow out of it. It’s something they have little control over.

And then building independence. They wanna do it for themselves. And since they don’t have control over their bodies and since their hand-eye coordination and visual tracking and all of these things aren’t very well and they don’t have a lot of experience doing it for themselves can also get kind of messy.

And so those are the eight reasons. I went through them really quick. There’s a whole article there.

You can check out if and you want to. And I just realized that I didn’t, I went through the article without the slides, didn’t transition to the article. Well, we’re gonna live with that.

Look, after 10 episodes, I’ll probably have all my software figured out. So let’s try to get me to where I’m supposed to be here. I’m so flustered.

Topic four, I wanna talk a little bit more about loose parts and variations on a theme. And we’ll make sure we get to the right camera this time. Oh, we gotta go back and actually talk about the thing.

And so when it comes to loose parts, I showed you the little scoopy thing earlier. So I’ve got a collection of little scoopy guys here. And so you might start collecting those as loose parts and maybe they go in the art area and the dramatic play area and the block area and kids start doing with them.

This little sieve thing is kind of awesome as well. I had it laying around so I thought I’d dig it out for this. And look, for just water play, for example, they’re gonna take it and they’re gonna spill.

I made red water so it’d be a little bit easier to see on camera and that’s gonna be delightful. But very simply, you can build variations. So you can see this one, I drilled a, what is that? A 3 1⁄8 inch hole in the bottom of it.

And then when you scoop, everything you scoop drains out the bottom of the container. And that’s a variation. That makes a different loose part than the one that didn’t have the holes in it.

And this one has a bunch of little tiny 1⁄8 inch holes drilled on the sides. And so when you pick that up, the water spills out, but it does so much more slowly. And when the water gets below a hole, it stops draining.

And then if you want it to drain again, you’ve got to kind of tilt it. And so those three scoops saved from wherever with five seconds and a cordless drill, you can create three very distinct loose parts. And that’s kind of one of the values of using open-ended materials like that.

On with the wrap up. First thing, check out the Loose Parts Ideas section of the Playvolution HQ site. If you need Loose Parts Ideas, I add one every week.

There’s a couple hundred of them over there and they’re there just to spark ideas for your own loose parts play. You want to try something new? Try drill painting. Message me if you have questions.

I’ll get to it here on the show in the future with more detail if you need that. Amazon Idea of the Week, we’re going to transition there. Somebody who supports the show by using that Amazon transition bought a bunch of these 12-piece sets of colored masking tape which I think are great loose parts.

You might want to check those out. And anyway, you want to support the show or the podcast or the website, check out that Amazon link. It’s in the episode notes.

And then share the show, share anything on the Playvolution HQ site if you like it. Next week, what’s coming up next week? Risk-taking. I think the whole show is going to be about taking risks.

Dad joke of the week. How does the moon cut his hair? Eclipse it. That’s just good stuff there.

This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back soon. Bye-bye.

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