Loose parts play

OutoftheBox is loose parts play. Listen to an excerpt from an interview with early years play specialist Mary Cooper recalling a morning spent with her granddaughter - a great example of how to facilitate play - just get out of the way and follow the child!

Wondering with a Year 5 class (9-10 year olds) in a school. Reflecting on the Donkey Wisdom story and the class community. Lots of deep creative talking.

This is why OutoftheBox is a movement of story and play…
”Play is pleasurable, has no extrinsic goals, is spontaneous and voluntary, involves active engagement and has systematic relations to what is not play such as creativity, problem solving, language learning, the development of social rules and a number of other cognitive and social phenomena.”
Catherine Garvey

‘What if’ play gives the learner the freedom to risk alternative points of view because in actuality there is no risk at all. She or he is only playing. This freedom to look at the world from a variety of points of view in a safe environment may help learners to discern new understandings…..it may help them acquire the courage to risk alternative meanings in other settings that aren’t as safe.”
Diane Hymans

“Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and love of play.”
Henri Matisse

“It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
D.W. Winnicott

“Play sets the stage for cooperative socialisation It nourishes the roots of trust, empathy caring and sharing.”
Stuart Brown

"In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.”
Simon Nicholson