Editor's note

Abstract

Explainer Loose parts - Last month we explored James Tunnell's book, ‘Loose parts & beyond’, him and many others have written about them, but what do we mean by loose parts? It is nothing new, as England (2019) says, ‘look back at your own childhood’ ‘when children used sticks as swords’, this was loose parts play, even if we didn't label it as such. Other people refer to Simon Nicholson's theory of loose parts from the 1970's as being where it originated. However he may have created the term, not the concept. Daly and Beloglovsky (2015) says loose parts are materials that ‘children can carry, combine, redesign, line up, take apart and put… back together in almost endless ways.’ This means that any object matching the above description is a loose part, regardless of the material from which it is made.