The beauty of presenting loose parts to young children is that they invite the child’s powers of destruction and construction in almost equal measure.

In moving, joining, poking, sorting, naming, stacking, painting, and tinkering with loose parts, the child continually makes and ‘unmakes’ configurations. By adding, subtracting, pausing, persevering, evaluating, revising, concluding, and revisiting, the child increasingly and exponentially expands her/his powers of cognition and personal agency while simultaneously delighting in the fun of open-ended play.

The surprise inherent to using loose parts in early childhood classrooms is tucked into every individual and collaborative venture: the gift of witnessing the unfolding of a perfectly unique offering.

- Judy Hodder