Natural Loose Parts Provision

The use of natural loose parts is popular in Reggio Inspired learning environments. Whether you follow the Reggio philosophy or not, using natural loose parts in your invitations to play has many benefits.

Read on to find out how you can use easily sourced loose parts from nature and get started with natural loose parts play in your classroom.

What are Natural Loose Parts?

Loose parts are any open-ended materials which can be creatively explored by children. Natural loose parts are loose parts collected from nature.

Loose parts are essential for investigative play experiences. Your children will manipulate and creatively use the loose parts to explore and learn. Loose parts can be natural or man-made. This blog post will focus on natural loose parts.

When collecting and organising your natural loose parts, keep in mind their fundamental purpose. They should be open-ended as they will be used in a variety of ways and for numerous purposes. They should also be sourced from the natural world.

Your collections can be completely random, or you can curate collections around specific themes. For example, items could be all made from the same material (wood), the same colour (green), all come from a specific habitat (the sea) or have the same size or texture (smooth).

Ideas for Natural Loose Parts

You can purchase natural loose parts or you can ethically collect them out in the natural world. You must consider sustainability practices and environmental laws if you plan on collecting your own natural loose parts from the environment.

Here are some ideas for natural loose parts you might like to purchase or legally collect:

Why use Natural Loose Parts?

Loose parts play has many developmental benefits. Whether the loose parts you offer are natural or man-made, your children should have opportunities for loose parts play in the classroom.

Using loose parts sourced from the natural environment has added benefits though.

Giving your children the opportunity to connect with nature is just one of the advantages of using loose parts sourced from the natural world.

You might be surprised to find there are many natural loose parts to find locally and even in your school grounds. Take your class out for a nature walk to collect some of the natural loose parts in your playground or the local environment. Collecting your own natural loose parts is another wonderful opportunity to connect with nature.

When children collect their own natural loose parts, they will develop a sense of ownership over the resources and their learning. Collecting their own loose parts can also help children connect with the school environment and create a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging and ownership is important because it can help to build a stronger class community.

As you and your children collect playground twigs, leaves, stones and feathers, you will have the opportunity for a spontaneous and memorable science lesson too.

Natural loose parts are environmentally friendly resources. Unlike so many of our other classroom resources, they do not need to be manufactured or mass produced so there is minimal impact on the environment. When your natural loose parts break or you no longer need them, they can be disposed of easily and with no harm on the environment. I have a mini guide and inventory to Loose Parts within my Patreon Community which you can access along with a range of other benefits from as low as USD5.00 per month. CLICK the picture below to check it out!

Including natural loose parts is very important for children to make connections to their family and local cultural heritage. Coming from the caribbean and an island home we have strong connection to country and the natural loose parts you will find there. It is extremely important for children to understand and experience these connections. Including locally sourced natural loose parts can help you do that.

Engagement with and collection of natural loose parts enable children to connect with and learn from nature.

“Experiences in nature are positively associated with stronger pro-environmentalism, such as emotional affinity toward nature (Kals et al., 1999), willingness to conserve biodiversity (Soga et al., 2016), willingness to pay for the conservation of urban green spaces (Lo and Jim, 2010), and pro-environmental behaviours (Evans et al., 2018).Overall, researchers have found a positive link between environmental attitudes and environmental behaviours (Bamberg and Möser, 2007).” – Frontiers in Psychology

Some Examples of Natural Loose Parts Play

Providing invitations to play with natural loose parts will give your children opportunities to express their creativity and develop higher order thinking skills.

As your children create and solve problems, they will in turn become intrinsically motivated to learn.

Through their problem-solving processes, they will experience success and failure. They will build their self-confidence and their self-concepts.

Fine motor and gross motor skills will be developed as they manipulate the natural resources.

I hope this blog post has given you some ideas to help you incorporate natural loose parts play into your classroom. There really are so many benefits of using them and they are so easy and cheap to source.

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