Manipulatives - Bright minds start with loose parts! 

Young children learn best through hands-on experiences, and manipulatives—such as blocks, counting bears, and shape sorters—play a vital role in their cognitive and motor skill development. These tactile tools encourage exploration, problem-solving, and creativity while building essential early math and literacy concepts.

By incorporating manipulatives into play-based learning, we empower children to make sense of the world around them in a concrete, meaningful way. Whether it's sorting, stacking, or measuring, these tools support fine motor skills, spatial awareness, and collaborative learning.

What is Loose Parts Play & Why is it Important in the Early Years?

The teacher term is “manipulatives”, and as the name implies, it consists of loose pieces that children can easily move and explore. These are open-ended materials like blocks, magnets, connectors, boxes, crates, pipes, buckets, rocks, leaves, and much more. They’re materials that children can manipulate by moving, combining, designing, redesigning, lining up, taking apart, and putting back together in multiple ways.

Manipulatives in the early years play a vital role in children's cognitive (thinking) and fine motor (small hand muscles) development. Loose parts have no instructions, no predetermined rules. They’re open-ended and child-directed—an essential accessory for play in every early years setting.

Benefits of Loose Parts as an Everyday Resource

The benefits of loose parts play for children’s development are endless!

Loose parts are:

• Portable – Children love that they can move them around, giving them ownership over their play experience.

• Open-ended – Inherently flexible, they can be used in countless ways.

• Sensory-rich – Perfect for exploring textures, weights, patterns, shapes, and discovering what happens when they bang, rub, or crush them together.

• A spark for imagination and creativity – Children decide what they become and how they’ll be used.

• Developmentally appropriate – Kids engage with them in ways that match their developmental stage.

• Skill-building and competency-enhancing – Supporting problem-solving, cooperation, decision-making, fine and gross motor skills, independence, vocabulary, as well as physical, artistic, mathematical, and scientific exploration.

• Expanding play possibilities – Enriching social, constructive, symbolic, dramatic, and exploratory play.

"When children interact in manipulative, they enter a world of ‘what if’ that promotes the type of thinking that leads to problem-solving and theoretical reasoning. Loose parts enhance children’s ability to think imaginatively and see solutions, and they bring a sense of adventure and excitement to children’s play." – Daly & Beloglovsky, 2015