Using Loose Parts at Daisykins Nursery

The unique approach we take to resourcing our Rugby Nursery

Here at Daisykins Nursery in Rugby over several months we have slowly made changes to each and every room to incorporate a loose parts approach to our environment and learning. A loose parts approach involves replacing some of the children's traditional learning toys and resources such as plastic role play toys, plastic trees in small world areas and plastic sand toys for more realistic resources.

Loose parts also involves using a lot of everyday and real objects for learning. Loose parts resources can be anything from curtain hoops, branch and tree slices, metal utensils, real weighing scales, wooden shapes, letters and numbers, pinecones and large stones, cardboard tubes and boxes. All of these resources are open ended which means the learning possibilities from these objects and resources are endless. We are constantly adding to our loose parts resources so if you have any ‘junk drawer’ items you think we could use please do bring them in to the nursery and ask us.

Many traditional children's toys have one purpose and often cannot be used for anything else for example plastic duplo blocks. These are lovely for building but often children will only use them for building. Whereas wooden blocks may be used for stacking and building, the child may then decide that the wooden blocks actually make great pretend food so they will be take to the role play area, the child may then decide the small blocks make brilliant treasure so they get hidden in the sand tray, they may then be used as chairs and beds for the dolls in the dolls house etc. This is because loose parts provide more of a blank canvas for children’s imagination whereas children see plastic duplo blocks as a toy with a purpose.

As many parents you might see how children tend to navigate towards real objects at home rather than their own toys and it is taking this natural curiosity children have and really allowing their imaginations and drive to play lead the learning.  This is a very unique approach to take towards children's learning and all of our practitioners have attended workshops and meetings to discuss how to make the most out of these types of resources. At Daisykins we have found this approach to be very successful in supporting the children’s learning.