Have you heard your child talking about loose parts at school?

Loose parts are open-ended materials: collections of small items that we can use for just about anything that you can imagine. Actually, just about anything that the kids can imagine!

Loose parts are a big part of our Math program in Kindergarten.  The first concept that we played with a lot in the first term and will revisit all through the year is Patterns. Recognizing, building and extending patterns is an important part of our early learning curriculum. Practicing this skill with beautiful materials is highly motivating for most kids.

We count them and sort them and build shapes with them and measure and compare size with them … there really isn’t a Math concept we can’t practice with loose parts!

One of the ways that we encourage our emergent writers to write, is to first build their stories with loose parts. Story Workshop is a twice weekly part of our schedule in which a big chunk of our time is devoted to finding our stories in materials. The Story Lab is a place where we can build and keep stories set up for longer stretches of time. As children play with loose parts, they instinctively engage their imaginations. A cork, for example,  might be a person, an animal, or a turret of a castle. I am always amazed at the creativity and flexible thinking that the children demonstrate when working with open-ended materials!

Sometimes loose parts lead us to explore ideas that I could never plan for. Recently, my small collection of old keys has quite literally unlocked so much creativity and wondering. They had many questions about where the keys had come from and what they had been used for. They spent much time excitedly trying to find locks that might fit the keys; testing, re-testing and studying the differences in key shapes and sizes. Our hallway door became the focus of their imaginings for days. None of the keys fit perfectly, but they did apparently unlock access to a secret staircase hidden beneath the school. This group added to this secret stairway story over the course of a week, and when they were done, a new pair took it on and decided that if none of my keys fit, then they would just have to make some new keys of their own! The keys have taken on a life of their own and the excitement over their possibilities has stopped many curious people at our door.

Eva explains a little bit about how they discovered the “Secret Staircase”

FYI, the keys mostly came from my sister, who moved apartments A LOT when she was in her 20s. She ended up with a big bag of useless keys and I was happy to take them for Kindergarten. If you have a collection like this at home, please send it to school! You can never have enough loose parts.