There Are Loose Parts, ... and Then There Are Loose Parts

Loose parts, or at least the term, has captured attention and imaginations in museums, early childhood centers, libraries, nature centers, parks, and playgrounds. The assorted, moveable and found materials and objects that spark, enrich, and extend children’s play and imaginations can be almost anything: feathers, pinecones, corks, bricks, shells, spools, or sticks.

In a world where increasingly little is left to chance in childhood and play, loose parts are wonderfully unscripted. These uncategorizable pieces and parts come with no specific directions for what they are or what children might do with them. Tucked into pockets, resting as a sedimentary layer in the bottoms of backpacks, clutched in small hands, or reverentially collected at the shore, children find, pick up, and carry treasured objects. They combine, line up, take apart, exchange, and rearrange loose parts in countless ways. In their play, children are writing the operations manual for shells, a cache of pinecones, bottle caps, or buttons with their play and imagination.

Loose parts, however, are not just stuff, junk, or a jumble of pieces and parts no one else wants or can use. To be sure there are treasures in discards and by-products of households, industry, and, nature. But since children explore the rich possibilities of these objects, meaningful exploration relies on thoughtful selection. Thinking with their hands bodies, minds, and imaginations, they observe, ask questions, and have ideas. They arrange and change objects, their settings, or even themselves. These explorations and creations are beautiful, but they're not necessarily art.

When children build, collage, or trade objects, they are comparing, sequencing, and seriating. They are valuing color, size, shape, and materials. As they lift, move, and occasionally drop glass pebbles, marker caps, or paper clips, they are discovering the properties of glass, plastic, and metal. In building with tubes and discs, they deal with balance and stability, use spatial reasoning, and solve problems three-dimensionally. New words about shapes, texture, designs, and structures are essential to describing how the fabric feels, the certain flat blue disc that is needed, or the delight a child is feeling.

We might think that only young children are inclined to explore possibilities and make discoveries with loose parts. In fact, anyone with limited experience to freely follow their curiosity and ideas about interesting loose parts–and do so often–will be engaged in similar ways. As more and more children of every background have fewer experiences of messing around with “stuff” from the basement workbench, the sewing drawer, or the town dump, they have less fluency with materials, objects, and their own vocabulary of materiality.

What Makes Good Loose Parts?

There are many objects that can be gathered for exploring in a classroom, an exhibit, home, under the bushes, or at the playground. Are all loose parts equal? What makes the difference between materials that foster meaningful, extended engagement and ones that fail or minimally engage children’s delight, imaginations, and experience?

As Without Windows Misha blogger asks, why not just shop at the dollar store? Cheaper materials do save money. But, he argues, their low cost is at the expense of child labor somewhere else. Why not make loose parts from scrap lumber? The measuring, cutting, and sanding are time consuming. Keva Planks/Kapla Blocks probably do it better with greater precision. Besides, loose parts are more than blocks. 

Why not use toys or commercial play objects as loose parts? Usually these are single purpose play objects. Once a child has mastered the key function—pushing the button to make a pinwheel spin—the child is ready for more. Due to their cost, these objects are seldom in great enough quantities to combine in novel ways. Ultimately, however, when children use designed toys, even very well designed ones, they become consumers of someone else’s creativity. With loose parts, children exercise their own.

Rich in Possibilities

While dollar store items and commercial toys may be loose and moveable, they lack other vital qualities that imbue loose parts with powers of attraction, fascination, exploration, and discovery: open-endedness, beauty, and abundance.

As Antoinette Portis’ book, Not a Stick points out, a stick is no single thing in children’s play.

It can be a wand, a baton, a fishing rod, or a snake. Like other open-ended materials, it is responsive to children’s questions, interests, and ideas and capable of changing use or meaning in a flash. Often an object’s very simplicity and its ambiguity lend it versatility and provoke new ideas. Small tree cookies, for instance, are variously stacked into a tower, used for money, or incorporated into a design–all in quick succession.

Features like shape, color, texture, and smell make loose parts even more interesting, suggesting new paths to explore. A child may gather all the red objects or all those that sparkle; arrange keys in a radial pattern and then end-to-end in a train; set pine cones on end to create a forest and arrange them in a spiral. Loose parts sized for small hands allow children to pick up easily, bring close for careful visual inspection, and arrange in many ways. Adding paper and markers to the mix can further extend the exploration and thinking.

Beauty

While saying that beautiful loose parts are more engaging than “ugly” ones may seem obvious, deciding what makes some beautiful is not. In the eye of the beholder will always be at work, but some qualities tend to make loose parts attractive and promising, if not beautiful.

When all of an object’s qualities are not immediately apparent, the objects can become more extraordinary. Up close, tiny sparkles in the stones are apparent, as is the fringe of the Burr Oak acorn caps. The crack in the stone looks like a bird. Objects that are similar but not identical are intriguing; natural variations in color, pattern, shape, carry information, reveal the diversity in nature and invite new language.

Ordinary objects and materials also become more fascinating when combined and mixed. Light interacting with objects shines through, reflects off of them, and casts shadows. Adding mirrors, multiplies objects. Water splashed on objects intensifies colors and makes them shiny. Combining ordinary objects points to new possibilities: shells arranged on an oval mat creating a mandala; sticks alternating with stones in a giant running pattern; a giant star defined by sticks filled with colored leaves; or multi-colored glass beads pressed into a large disk of clay.

Ideas for what is beautiful may be particular to the context. In a nature preschool, for instance, natural and local materials might be a high priority. Without Windows blogger, Misha, is particularly interested in “loose parts from the earth” that “can be disposed of in the earth.” Tree cookies, sand, rocks, and acorns might be valued over cardboard and buttons.

At the same time, manufactured discards and by-products can be compelling when carefully selected. Clear plastic colored shapes, especially when placed on a light table, or multi-colored plastic caps in great quantities can inspire designs, patterns, narratives, and self-portraits. Discarded objects like tubes, reels, and gaskets in similar shapes and sizes, and deliberately chosen in only black and white invite exploration of shape without the distraction of.  

Abundance

As important as open-ended and beautiful materials are, seeing objects in great abundance jolts us out of our usual mindset. Perceptions of the object itself and what it can do change. Seemingly ordinary objects like buttons, brushes, cardboard tubes, or rubber bands suddenly seem remarkable. The abundance of objects feels contagious, infecting us with a sense of expanding possibilities. Vast quantities seem to confer permission to explore freely, take risks, and make mistakes.

When time is also in abundance–when there is time to look closely at each pebble, feel and compare them, arrange them just so, and rearrange them again–then the possibilities for thinking and creating that loose parts offer also expand. 

Now Playing … At the Store

“Look! This is a hiding place,” a 6 year old says pointing to a narrow opening. Two small barefoot boys climb on top of a scale model of a tent and slide down. Four girls join hands, move in a circle, sing and kick their feet. Two girls flop down on the wavy chair and pretend to swim along its curves. A boy drags benches into an alcove and starts telling jokes.

Where is this? The Backyard? The playroom or playground? The museum? No, these children are playing in stores: a fabric store, an outdoor recreation gear store, a clothing store, and a bookstore.

Perhaps as a child, you remember standing inside the hinged mirrors and closing them around you to create your very own infinity box. Did you cruise the shoe department looking for high-heels? Then sling a purse over your shoulder and clomp around? In bookstores did you gallop up and down the long aisles between towering bookshelves? Did you bounce on mattresses? Were the nuts and bolts coins and treasure?

Adults typically view stores as places to do errands and attend daily tasks. They buy groceries, pick-up gardening supplies, take screens for repair, purchase books, and look at furniture. For store owners, managers, and cashiers the store is a commercial setting, designed to display and sell merchandise, answer customer questions, and move them through check-out.

For children, however, stores are natural places to play. Yes, there are some stores like LEGO, Kapla blocks, and American Girl dolls designed for children to play with and hopefully buy toys. On the other hand, as multi-sensory environments full of props and intriguing spaces, stores offer attractive possibilities for play. The spatial cues, fixtures, lighting, and objects that entice adult shoppers are often interpreted differently by children. Furthermore, children are taken along on innumerable shopping trips that involve lots of waiting. Children sit in grocery carts while pushed up and down aisles; they hang around as a parent compares products; and they wait some more while items are scanned and bagged. It’s not surprising that children find play opportunities in stores.

What does this tell us about children’s play?

While found play experiences in stores are, admittedly, short play episodes, they nevertheless possess key qualities of rich, authentic play. We see children claim the space, fixtures, and props and direct their play in stores. With shelves and racks of clothing, these settings surpass the box for costumes and dress-up. Networks of pathways meander and intersect hinting of maps, roadways, rivers, or escape routes. Aisles lead to racks loaded with multi-colored clothing, bins are chock full of giant sponges, and low platforms are stacked with rugs. Enclosed and semi-enclosed spaces are perfect for ducking into and hiding in a quick game of hide-and-seek. Relatively movable fixtures like benches can be dragged and arranged to serve as a stage or an obstacle course. Mirrors punctuating the walls add special effects. Distinctive lighting spotlights the action.

Children play where they find themselves. While stores afford many opportunities to play, they have few, if any, rules about play. Adults are otherwise engaged or have simply not given thought to children playing in the store. Left on their own and inspired by displays, clothing racks, aisles, enclosures, and accumulations of merchandise, children enter new worlds, invent games, escape from imagined bandits, and fashion adventures. Imaginative possibilities open as coiled hoses become snakes, bolts of cloth become mummies, pillows are icebergs, and tents are slides.

The play flows and shifts. A fine game of monster may pick up a story thread suggested by shopping routines, a piece of merchandise, or a chance phrase heard from a shopper. Is this pretend play? Building play? Exploratory play? A musical game? Like much of the best play, it is a mix, quickly shifting from pretending, to making up rules, to large motor exploration that involves crawling under sales tables.

In store play, children come together with other children similarly expected to wait. Playmates are siblings, friends, and, often, new acquaintances. Even in short play episodes, issues about who can play, roles, and rules arise, are hashed out, and resolved. Play is reconfigured with the departure of a child called by a caregiver.

While perhaps not obvious, learning as well as fun is part of these found play experiences in stores. In negotiating play rules and spaces, children use social skills, solve physical problems, interpret spatial cues, and test memory. They incorporate categories of things displayed together into their play. They use vocabulary to name and describe objects; they listen and speak in discussing rules, and are they likely to read an occasional label and price tag.

What does children’s play in stores suggest about places for play in museums?

Unwittingly hospitable to play, store settings offer clues about appealing spaces for play and exploration in museums. It’s not that museums should create more store-like environments or more store exhibits. Rather, museums may do well to look at stores (and other settings) where children play spontaneously to identify qualities that are often missing in spaces planned for play. Features and qualities that are present–and absent–in store settings are needed to support children in directing play, using their imaginations, engaging in open-ended activities, and problem solving. 

Children take charge. A largely unscripted environment is a powerful companion for fashioning worlds and concocting adventures. As children shape experiences by and for themselves, their ideas, motivation, and competence are apparent. They are masterful at taking advantage of features such as height, movability, form, texture, and color to advance and extend their play.

Too much adult-driven design interferes with children discovering ways to rearrange, recombine, and repurpose elements for their exploration and amusement. The flexibility and movability of shelves, rolling racks, carts, and benches that facilitate changing displays also allow children to experiment with forms and modify spaces in meaningful ways–sometimes working together to manage bigger and bulkier items.

Imaginations at play. When a rack of clothes becomes a spaceship and the narrow space between two hanging jackets becomes an arrow slit in a castle, we know children’s imaginations are alive and lively. Simple, suggestive forms invite multiple interpretations and reflect many opportunities in contrast to the overly-defined forms typical of many designed play environments. Literal forms like trees, castles, and houses dictate the meaning of a form, substituting a dominant idea for yet-to-be-discovered possibilities.

Novelty unleashes imaginations as does juxtaposition and complexity. Children’s imaginations are inspired by unfamiliar objects and materials, enormous quantities, and unusual combinations of objects typical of stores. Hundreds of light fixtures, towering racks of jewelry, yards of chain, and an ocean of mattresses spark fresh ideas compared to several of one thing or almost anything at home.

Engaging in open-ended activities. In play, children are unlikely to give themselves a defined outcome, seek rules from adults, or give themselves a test. Right answers are virtually irrelevant in most types of play. Children have ideas that they are interested in exploring and play suits their purposes. Play confers a kind of freedom to experiment. In a setting like a store that is unconcerned with (and unintended for) children’s play, children follow and negotiate their interests and ideas.

The “what if” possibilities of store shelves bursting with books, pegboards loaded with whisks, a wall of paint samples, and tables with bolts of fabric are unlimited. And so are any spaces that are rich with information about the world, open to changing and modifying through play, and limited by few rules.

Perhaps this reflection suggests an opportunity beyond observing play and play environments. Less than obvious settings and everyday places are sources of useful information, lessons, and insights on delivering services, experiences, environments, and interactions to museum visitors and communities. What places are truly welcoming? Where do people feel in control? Where is customer service excellent? Where does inclusion and access feel authentic? Where are barriers to participation low? In what settings are processes efficient, warm, and personal? How can we extend our curiosity and awareness about what we care about that is done well and differently by others?

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Exploration and Play…Play and Exploration

• Now Playing…On the Sidewalk

• Now Playing…Nature In the City

• More Varied Places for Children

• Hardware Stores and Museums

The Kidspace Physics Forest

On a recent Saturday afternoon in January, the Galvin Physics Forest at Kidspace Children’s Museum (Pasadena, CA) was full of families with children of all ages, from babies in backpacks and strollers to “big” kids 9 or 10 years; in adult-child pairs; with grandmas and grandpas; and in families of families.

I’ve made several observations in the Physics Forest on two visits to Kidspace, on both a weekday and a weekend, in fall and in winter. Every time I have observed and listened, I have heard laughter, lots of laughter. Even belly laughs float across the site. Shouts of delight, like, ”I did it!” and “This is so cool!” also come through loud and clear over the chatter.

Physics experiments are not unusual in children's museums where children explore the forces and motion that shape our world. Active learners and enthusiastic players, children are interested in making things fly, bounce, spin, and roll. They are intrigued by what they can do to pop a ball, get more lift to a rocket, or blast the bottle. Physics experiments make children’s ideas and efforts visible to both them and to adults.  

In fact, many of the experiments in the Physics Forest are just like ones in many children’s museums. Several features, however, distinguish the Kidspace Physics Forest from physics exhibits in children’s museums as well as many science centers. It’s big, it’s outdoors, and it calls attention to how bottle rockets and tennis ball launchers, pulleys and air cannons are physics. Having a physics exhibit makes sense for Kidspace with the California Institute of Technology as a neighbor and Caltech astrophysicist Dr. Mike Brown as a KCM board member. (Check out an interview with him in Hand To Hand.

The Cool Fan as a merry-go-round

Designed by Hands On! Inc., the Physics Forest opened in summer 2012 with 13 physics experiments on a 26,600 square foot site. The 12 stations are: Bottle Rocket, Tennis Ball Launcher, Ball Bounce, Pulley’s, Wheel Roll, Magic Mirror, Roller Coaster, Ball Range, Pendulum, Air Cannon, Giant Lever, and Cool Fan. Sun Splitter, a 13^th experiment, was recently removed because it required multiple adjustments by staff daily. Generally, two staff were present in the Physics Forest. One moved around the site. The other was stationed at the Cool Fan, the experiment that seemed to invite the most creative use from children.   

The arroyo-inspired landscape is a natural site for exploring. Experiments are planted among native plants

Bridge across the dry creek

and substantial trees. Winding paths both define and connect the experiments sometimes crossing dry steam beds with immense slabs of wood. These same slabs provide generous seating around the site. Smaller play spaces with related activities, like building and sound makers, are scattered among the experiments and sunshade covered. Pasadena’s 70º sunshine completes the splendid outdoor conditions for exploring physics.

Multiple entrances to the Physics Forest allow children to start anywhere and easy visual access across the site makes it easy to navigate and be visually oriented. Pathways invite children and families to wander and follow their interests. Some children find and stick with one activity; others try a couple of experiments before discovering one that really engages their attention. Children call out to one another, “Abby, this is fun. Come to the Tennis Ball Launcher.”

While some experiments seem more popular than others and some seem easier to use, I was impressed overall by how engaged children and adults were in exploring, trying, talking, observing, and helping. Three qualities associated with engaging museum experience and learning come through in what I heard and observed.

• Everyone gets into the act

• Extended explorations

• More than physics in play

Everyone Gets into the Act

Children work together sometimes calling out suggestions to others, as a boy at the Giant Fan did, “Get some friends to help.” Getting into the act is made easier with multiple positions that most of the experiments offer: 3 inclines on the Wheel Roll and 3 seats at Pulleys; 2 stations at the Ball Bounce and 2 Giant Levers. An experiment like the Cool Fan requires extra pairs of hands and the combined efforts of several children. The generous space around each experiment accommodates several people to gather

When the ball escaped the Tennis Ball Launcher, one whole family worked together to get it back in the basket. The 2-year old cried, “Oh no!” The 4-year old asked her dad to lift her up and throw the ball in; “Too low” she observed. The 6-year old chased the ball and tossed it into the basket several times but missed. In the end the grandmother made the basket, and the experiment resumed.

A father's Air Cannon tips to his daughter

Adults who often hang back and watch children explore definitely were part of the action. One child called out, “Mom, help me,” when she wanted to be hoisted up at Pulleys. But parents also drew their child’s attention to an experiment with, for instance, “Look at the wheels you can roll over there.” Adults served as physics coaches for their children. At the Giant Lever, a father advised his 4 year-old daughter, “Use all your weight. Look where you are putting your feet.” At the Air Cannon, a father pointed out to his daughter not only how it worked, but some variations she might try. 

While there’s a high level of engagement, not everyone is focusing on the experiments. One small girl delightedly plowed through the bark mulch on her belly near the Tennis Ball Launcher. At the Roller Coaster a 4-year old boy was far more interested in accumulating balls than constructing or testing a coaster. Oblivious to the physics focus, an older girl used the wooden planks across the dry creek bed as a balance beam.

Extended Explorations

Designed as platforms for open-ended science learning through play, the experiments encourage self- guided exploration. Children and adults talk, ask questions, investigate with levers and ropes; they watch balls pop up and roll down. Noticing the effects of what they do, they share tips, refer to the text, talk some more, building intuitive understandings about how things work.

In the Physics Forest, related physics content is near, clear and accessible. These bold, can’t-miss, two-sided graphic panels stand at every experiment. Their 4-part message–Try It!, Play With It!, It’s Physics, More at Home–follows a typical exploratory process.

Persistence and ingenuity at the Roller Coaster

Clear accessible text, however, has a hard time competing with active exploration as a source of information about what’s happening. Having other players to watch and talk with, loose parts to combine in multiple ways, and satisfying visual effects extend even casual explorations. This was most apparent at the Roller Coaster. Always filled with activity, 15-20 adults and children working in 3-4 family groups while more watched from the benches was not uncommon. Children shouted out ideas like, “Let’s try this curvy one,” upon discovery of a rounded piece of track. A 4-year old’s joyful, “I know, I know, I know” was followed by a flurry of extending track and testing the run. Children were impressed with longer runs after following performance tips about the height of the entrance. One girl’s persistence paid off with new strategies for starting the ball at higher and higher points. Another rolled a ball, watched it, fetched it, and asked, “What happened?” only to try again. Steady and extended activity was punctuated by, “That was amazing!”

More Than Physics in Play

Play and science learning assume many forms and reflect developmental differences among children, whether it is impatience waiting for a turn, making and revising predictions, or taking a systematic approach. 

Predictions and revisions at the Bottle Rocket

Three children at the Bottle Rocket filled the bottle with water to different levels, launched it, and watched it fly. The 4-year old boy suddenly waved his arms and announced that he knew that the full bottle would fly the highest. His 9-year old sister set about systematically testing 3 conditions. She hit the button to fill the bottle to a low level; the bottle flew up part way. The boy was very pleased with that. As the older sister prepared to fill the bottle halfway, their 2-year old sister dashed in and hit the full button. The full bottle flew up, rising only part way. The third bottle, filled halfway, shot to an impressive height compared to the other bottles, thrilling the boy. Pumping his fist, he shouted, "I knew the half-filled bottle would go the highest. I knew it!" Like a typical 4-year old, he was happy to revise his original prediction in order to be right.

The large-scale, highly interactive experiments are platforms for exploring how the world works, but they support many kinds of learning as well. Along with children making predictions, and engaging in trial and error, they are taking turns and asserting increasing independence as a 4-year old did with, “I don’t want any help” to dismiss his parent’s offer of assistance. Children engage in friendly competition announcing, “We won!” and express their sense of accomplishment with, “I did it!”

The Physics Forest also supports possibilities that designers and physicists are unlikely to have imagined. As a 3-year old peered into the Mirror Maze, his father asked, “What do you see? Does it look weird?” After a pause, the child replied, “Maybe I can see the sunset.”