You get the most out of an environment, you can do the most things and fund and be creative when you have all sorts of variables, all sorts of different things in it. Things that can change, things that you can move, things that you can build with. Yeah. So that sparks the creativity.
Hi, this is Rusty Keeler and you’re listening to the Play Nature Podcast where we talk about play nature, playing in nature, and the nature of play. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s have a listen.
Alright. Welcome to the podcast. Today I’ll be talking about loose parts. Loose parts for outdoor play. Yeah, one of my favorite things. So today I’m in a new spot because Itca has been having these massive rainstorms and the creek. Was so high today that I couldn’t even get to my spot. Yeah. Exciting. So I’m up a little ways from the creek.
If you listen carefully, you can hear it. There it is. And yeah, I’m in a nice little spot in the woods and that’s kind of fun too. And I’m seeing all the things that come up, the new things that are coming up out of the ground, may apples and trilliums and other, oh, there’s ferns. I. That are unfurling out of the ground.
Pretty fun. And that’s the beauty of nature and the seasons and spring, that there’s all this different stuff happening. And so we want that stuff in our children’s environments too, right? Celebrate the seasons. Today we’re gonna be celebrating loose parts for play. Lots of fun stuff to talk about and at the end I’ll answer your questions about loose parts, including what are some of my favorite loose parts, kinda what are the basic loose parts, and what’s the average cost of doing loose parts.
Well, here’s a spoiler alert. You could do ’em cheaply and even free, so, but we’ll get to that. First of all, what are loose parts? Loose parts, the stuff, bringing the stuff to your outdoor space, and it could be boards, traffic cones, hula hoops, plastic dinosaurs, balls, straw bales, tires, that kind of stuff for creative play.
Now as we think about this, first, first let’s take do a little thought exercise, and I want you to imagine a classroom. Think about a nice classroom, maybe a preschool classroom or a kindergarten classroom, and think that the classroom is beautiful. The room itself is beautiful, and there’s beautiful furniture.
There’s nice big windows. The the color of the walls are soothing. There’s shelving, there’s storage, there’s a carpet, there’s a sink. All sorts of great stuff. But what if there was no stuff on those shelves? What if there were, there were no dress up clothes or no blocks, building blocks, or no classic dinosaurs, no books, no art materials, no paper, no pens, no snacks.
No stuff in that classroom, just the furniture. How weird would that be? Right? Who would do that? Nobody. But why do we do that? For the outdoor space, huh? Yeah. So many, so many times people think, okay, the outdoors will build some, put some playground equipment out there. We’ll have the proper safety fall zone according to federal safety guidelines.
And we’ll call it good and it could be good, but it’s not great unless you have loose parts. Loose parts will make it great and loose parts can make any yard great. No matter how big, how small, how natural, or how manmade. If you add loose materials to your yard, you will boost your children’s outdoor play and learning.
Their creativity will flow in new ways that will amaze you. Their communication with other children, their collaboration with other children, their construction skills, their ideas, they’re fun because children get to have control over their environment. They get to change their environment, and just like the indoors, they get to build book blocks and play with plastic dinosaurs and figures.
Stories happen, journeys, imaginations, roaming free with the stuff that they create and the outdoors needs it too. And you know, just like the indoors, we think that there’s benefits. There’s benefits to blocks, there’s benefits to magnet tiles. Well, there’s benefits for children for outdoor play with loose parts too.
And you know, I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. For me, play for play’s sake is good enough. I know that’s the way play is the way. Play is how we learn, grow, become who we are, express ourselves, and it’s good enough for me. I wanna support play. There’s a million, billion things going on. Their hearts, minds, bodies, spirits, their brains, their bodies.
Their muscles, their bones, their synapses, their emotional states that all sorts of things are happening. They’re growing, they’re, they’re coming online, they’re exploring the world and finding out who they are, and they do that through play and loose parts really help them do it. Now the same time. You know, it’s important to believe in that, but it’s often also important to be able to.
Talk and communicate why you’re doing things like that with children, why you’re having loose parts, why you got beat up pots and pan out there, why you have scrap lumber, why your playground might not look all shiny, like a big fancy piece of playground equipment. You have mud and shovels and marbles and plastic dinosaurs in the mud.
Why are you doing that? So we put the words to it. And so the benefits, and so, you know, again, the beauty of play is that it checks all the boxes, right? If you’re talking to administration, if you’re talking to parents what their goals are and their hopes are for their children, if you’re talking to licensing what their concerns are, if you’re talking to other staff who are maybe new to the idea of loose parts, it’s important to be able to communicate that.
I feel like that’s kind of the state that we’re in now is. Thinking about how to communicate these things that we believe in. So with loose parts, it’s good for cognitive development. Get ready here. Here comes a big list, cognitive development, problem solving, critical thinking, spatial awareness as they’re building with things and sticking them in the ground and trying stuff out and seeing what, how things work.
Structurally, their ideas, geometry patterns, measurement, comparative thinking. Scientific exploration, social and emotional development, cooperation, empathy, conflict resolution when you’re working with materials out there, self-expression, self-confidence. I can do this. I can build this Emotional regulation, independence, responsibility, I.
Over your materials. Physical development, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, strength and endurance, sensory development, language and communication, vocabulary expansion, narrative skills, listening skills. You know, as children are giving and taking and working together on projects, there’s time management planning and organization time awareness. Oh, one more minute. There’s only one more minute till we go in. All right. I gotta hurry up and keep building and wrap it up. Social skills, friendship building, teamwork, negotiation, communication skills, creativity and imagination. Resourcefulness, independence, and decision making Autonomy. Resilience and risk management.
So there’s risk taking and flexibility, all in all, a ton of good stuff and all that could happen with a couple of tires, some boards and plastic dinosaurs and shovels. Yeah. Or anything that you can think of. So here’s a story for you about an aha moment in my life as a designer. I started off doing fixed playground equipment.
That’s how I got my start in the play world. Was designing for it and I was designing fixed equipment and I was loving it. I was tapping my creativity and drawing ideas and building little models, and then building full scale mockups for children to try, and then coming up with, you know, finished products to go at schools and stuff.
And one day I was having lunch and the marketing director was reading a book by Dr. Joe Frost called Play in Play Scapes. And he was reading the chapter about adventure playgrounds. And I’ll do more podcasts about adventure playgrounds ’cause I really love them now. But I was sort of new to them then.
And Adventure Playgrounds, in short, are kind of these wild and wooly loose part playgrounds, especially coming from Europe. After World War ii, kids are building their own playgrounds and saws and hammers and scrap lumber, building their own forts and cooking over fires and having animals and nature and gardens and all sorts of great stuff.
And the marketing director shut the book, looked at me. Solemnly and said, I don’t even know why we’re doing play equipment. These are the best playgrounds for children. And I was like, what young designer can’t need design equipment? What do you mean? And what he meant was these environments, they’ve got the pizazz, they’ve got the endless possibilities.
They can match children’s creativity. They can make room for children’s creativity. Children can build their own spaces, they can change their own spaces. They can destroy their own spaces with fixed playground equipment. They can only use this stuff. Sort of how it was made to be used. Right. I realized, I came to realize that as the designer, I had like the most flexibility I.
And fun and creativity. Playing with the ideas, sketching things out, changing ideas and you know, trying things out and making stuff. And then once it was done, stand back and the children could use it, but they couldn’t change it. So we want children’s spaces that have the most open-ended, endless possibilities and loose parts do that.
Have you ever heard the theory of loose parts. Yes. There’s a famous article written in Landscape Architect Magazine back in 1971 by Simon Nicholson, and it’s about loose parts, and he was lobbying for, and he was kind of making that same case that all people are creative, right? It’s not just the designers and the architects and the planners.
All people have the spark of creativity in them. They just don’t always have the opportunities to change their environment, to play with ideas, to play with their environment. And so he was lobbying for environments that are flexible, that have loose stuff. His article was called How Not To Cheat Children, the Theory of Loose Parts and the big, kinda the famous quote pulled out of that is, in any environment.
Both the degree of inventiveness and creativity and the possibility of discovery are directly proportional to the number and kinds of variables in it. In other words, you get the most out of an environment. You can do the most things and fun and be creative when you have all sorts of variables, all sorts of different things in it, things that can change, things that you can move, things that you can build with.
Yeah. So that sparks the creativity, the inventiveness, and so that’s what we want for our children’s faces, right? If we’re promoting play and connection to the outdoors. Yes. So, you know, jumping ahead, being inspired by that and being inspired by the Adventure Playgrounds. I help start. Uh, an adventure playground inspired place called the Hands on Nature Anarchy Zone at Ithaca Children’s Garden here in Ithaca.
And it’s a wild and wooly, rough and tumble place filled with loose materials. It’s big dirt, mounds and tunnels, trees to climb boulders, but’s filled also with tires and boards and branches and shovels, rope magnifying glasses, all sorts of stuff. It is this idea that it is this open-ended, loose parts place filled with those variables.
A friend of mine was doing her PhD research project and she looked at, at the anarchy zone. She wanted to study the anarchy zone and that kind of play. So she juxtaposed, she looked at a group of children at a summer camp, played at the anarchy zone. Then she also observed that same group of children on their traditional playground play equipment playground at the school where they, they was on their headquarters, and what she found was the anarchy zone.
Children were engaged, they were gauged for hours, like they would go there for two hours. They would be engaged the whole time digging in the dirt, building forts with boards, moving water around in five gallon buckets in teams, ’cause it’s heavy. They’re building their own zip lines, they’re climbing trees, they’re, you know, going through the tunnels.
They’re doing all sorts of stuff endlessly. The counselors that were with him, the adults just stood on the sidelines or sat on the picnic table and said, Hey, we don’t even have to do anything when we’re here. I. The children are so engaged and they’re looking at that same group of children on the traditional playground.
They would come out and they would be engaged on that play equipment for 20 minutes, 20 minutes, kind of as a rule, almost every time when the clock struck 20 after swinging all the swings and climbing the equipment. And doing the monkey bars and spinning and all the stuff that the play equipment was allowing you to do.
After 20 minutes, there would start to be conflict. There would start to be injuries. There’s a scarcity of materials, maybe two basketballs. So there would be arguments over that. Conflict over that. And then children, after that 20 minutes of using the PLA equipment, that it was the way it was kind of designed to be used, they would start using it in ways it was not designed to be used.
Climbing to higher things and falling off, so getting hurt. So loose parts, play spaces, endless possibilities, fully engaged, traditional play equipment, you know, a certain amount of time. Now as an aside, we think about the average recess time, and it probably is 20 minutes right at the average elementary school, which that’s a whole subject, sad subject on its own that we’ll get into later, later podcast.
So the equipment works for that 20 minutes. But when we, you know, we are talking about engaging children’s play and creativity and supporting them the best we can. We want a, of course, longer time outside and we want the loose parts for full engagement. So what do you think? Can you do some loose parts?
And in my normal spirit of dreaming big, starting small and never stopping, you can do that with loose parts. Yeah, so you could dream it up. Maybe you want an anarchy zone. All sorts of stuff. Adventure, playground style, kids are building, doing wild stuff. But you don’t have to do it all at once. Start small.
Pick the first couple things that you put out there. Even cardboard boxes. Yeah. If you had, doesn’t matter if you have a natural play space or if you have a manmade play equipment with rubber surfacing, you put some cardboard boxes out there and the play will change. If you stand back, if you really commit to it and say, all right, are we gonna watch the play?
We’re gonna let things go. And it could be big cardboard boxes, like refrigerator boxes, or it could just be a whole batch of classic Amazon boxes. Just put it out there and see what happens, observe, make notes, and then think, okay, the next day, what do you add to it? Oh, maybe we will add paint. Maybe we will add a blanket.
Or pillows or who knows what. Alright, now it’s time for questions. So here’s a question.
What are some basic loose parts that you recommend getting for small home-based childcare? And that’s the beauty of loose parts. They’re good for all children’s environments. Yes. Public parks. Yes. Elementary schools, yes. Big childcare centers and yes, small home-based childcare centers too. So another beauty of loose parts is that there’s no perfect loose park or nothing that you have to have, anything will do.
So it’s really up to you what you could get your hands on. But here’s some of my favorites as stated previously. The cardboard box. Yeah. Cardboard box. Scrap lumber boards, two by fours, two by fours. Cut to different lengths. You could say on the edge. Smooth if you want. If there’s any little areas when you cut it, when they’re cut.
And of course, kitchen stuff. Pots, pants ERs, spoons for digging. All that stuff is great. Turkey. Basters shovels. Yes. Dig the hole, find a corner of your yard, and dig the hole. Traffic codes, tires. Now in my online course, I go in kind of depth about safety around tires and how to use them, but. Quickly drill holes in the sidewalls.
Let the water out and scrub them down with soap and water when you first get them. And it’s better to get old tires, not new tires. Fabric tablecloths, blankets, tarps, sails about marbles. Little jewels. One of my favorite childcare centers here in Ithaca has all these little jewels and they sprinkle them out throughout the yard and children just come upon them throughout the day or different days, and they find them and collect them, and then they spread ’em out too.
It just becomes part of the play branches. Maybe there’s some branches that have fallen into your neighborhood or people are taking some trees down so you could get some nice branches, sand off any pokey parts and straw bales. I love me some straw bales. You could get a four or five of ’em. Have a nice reading circle or stack ’em up, like kids stack ’em up for.
Little tower or you could make obstacle courses or they could just be random benches around or you know, who knows Children pushing them and pulling them and lugging them around together. It takes cooperation ’cause they’re kind of bulky. Uh, you’re getting into gross motor skills. Yeah, so again, it doesn’t take fancy stuff.
Which leads me to the next question. What’s the average cost of adding loose parts? I’m glad you asked that question. The average cost is $51, 32 cents on average. I’m just kidding. I don’t know. There is no average, and in fact, I think the best loose parts are. The ones you get cheaply or the ones you get free, free, free.
So the average cost could be zero. So zero could be looking in your kitchen cabinet for those frying pans and putting out the word to your people to see if they have any extra frying pans or kitchen stuff. If they’re weaning out their, their kitchen, you know, there’s always a few pots and pans that are ready for that mud kitchen.
Uh, and it could be a, maybe you have a connection with a farmer who has straw bales, but I’m all about looking at your community now cheaply to get things cheaply. You can go to secondhand stores, do a little shopping here in Ithaca, we have the reuse, a reuse store. It’s kinda like a Salvation Army or a Goodwill store.
So you can find all sorts of goodies, you can imagine how children would play with them, and then also thinking about your community. Where you can get stuff like, where could you get a hundred used tennis balls? How about a tennis club in your town, or how about the high school tennis team when they’re done?
You know, they use tennis balls. They like the fresh ones out of the can, and so they practice with their tennis balls, but at some point they get old. They get rid of them, but if they knew you wanted them, if they knew you’d take ’em, you could get ’em. The same goes for high school soccer teams. They get rid of their balls.
You don’t need brand new ones. You don’t wanna pay for brand new ones. And even if you had ones that were squishy, right, if you’re just using them play, children are using them in different ways than the varsity soccer team might use them. Same with footballs, same with sales. You could contact a local sailboat shop or sailing club, get some sales that could be used too.
So it’s really thinking about your community. I love that with building natural play spaces and the, it’s thinking about where you can get stuff, materials from your community, but the same goes for loose parts. And with that, I’ll leave you with the idea and I’ll leave you with. The idea of dreaming big and starting small with loose parts.
And in the show notes I have the free, my free outdoor loose parts guide. Lots of good stuff in there. And a link to my online course, my Outdoor Loose Parts online course that walks you through the what, the where, and the how, what loose parts are where you could get them. I go, you can go to a shopping spree with me, a virtual shopping spree, and the how.
How do you store them? How do you use them? How do you put them out? How do you manage them? How do you put them away? How do you make sure they’re safe? So I go through all that stuff and in the show notes, they’ll also be a special discount code for you podcast listener. Yay. Alright, well with that. Dream it big, start it small, never stop.
Good luck with your loose parts adventures. And as always, if you have any questions, you can email me at Plain Nature podcast@gmail.com. And also you can share your loose parts stories or send me pictures of the endless creativity that is flowing in your outdoor space. Alright, till next time. Play well.
All right. Thanks for listening. Do you have a comment or a question? Email me at playnaturepodcast@gmail.com You know, I like talking about this stuff and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. I. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide, fun stuff in there.
And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures, and when it comes to adding nature to your yard or loose parts or saying yes to risky play, my favorite motto is dream big, start small. And never stop. Oh yeah. Woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right. Have fun out there.
