Abstract
It is important to consider physical activity and movement in early life to ensure children establish and maintain healthy physical activity patterns. Recent evidence has highlighted the importance of outdoor play and the childcare environment. Active outdoor play, especially free play, supports independence, self-regulation and allows children to explore their world and make decisions. Loose parts or open-ended materials are natural or synthetic resources that can be used in more than one way, allowing children to experiment through play. Incorporating loose parts into play environments creates opportunity for new play experiences. Despite growing evidence supporting loose parts play, the perspectives of childcare providers on the benefits and challenges of this type of play have been overlooked. The purpose of this study was to identify the benefits and challenges of incorporating loose parts play into the outdoor environments of childcare centres, from the perspectives of educators who took part in the Physical Literacy in the Early Years (PLEY) project. PLEY is a larger, mixed methods intervention study with the goal of evaluating a loose parts intervention in early childcare settings. This portion of the project used qualitative description to explore educators' perspectives. Data were collected using focus groups (n = 15) with early childhood educators (n = 3–5 in each group). Thematic analysis was used to identify five themes relating to benefits, and four themes relating to challenges. Benefit themes included: loose parts enable children to take risks; loose parts spark creativity and imagination; loose parts contribute to problem-solving abilities; loose parts cultivate independence and confidence; and loose parts build relationships and leadership. Challenges included: apprehension of loose parts; loose parts as a novelty; sustainability of loose parts; and loose parts present challenges with storage. Overall, we found educators perceived outdoor loose parts play to have multiple social and cognitive benefits for preschool-aged children that are critical for optimal growth and development, and overall health and wellness.
Highlights
Participation in physical activity early in life has been consistently associated with improved motor and cognitive development, psychosocial and cardiometabolic health, and bone and skeletal health [1]
From the focus group data, five themes relating to benefits of loose parts play, as perceived by educators, were developed
Themes are supported by quotations, which are identified using focus group numbers that took place at 3-months (3M) or 6-months (6M) and with the original cohort (OC) or new cohort (NC)
Summary
Participation in physical activity early in life has been consistently associated with improved motor and cognitive development, psychosocial and cardiometabolic health, and bone and skeletal health [1]. Establishing physical activity early in life is critical as sedentary behaviours have shown to track into childhood and adolescence [4]. Tremblay and colleagues [5,6] developed a set of age-specific 24-hour movement guidelines designed to help children meet recommended amounts of physical activity, screen time and sleep. Since the publication of the 24-hour movement guidelines, evidence has highlighted the importance of ideal combinations of movement behaviours (e.g. high sleep, low sedentary behaviour, high physical activity) for optimal health in the early years [7]. There is considerable interest in exploring and targeting correlates of physical activity behaviour in early life to ensure that children establish and maintain healthy physical activity patterns throughout these critical developmental years
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