Loose Parts 4

Inspiring 21st-Century Learning

Lisa Daly, Miriam Beloglovsky

• Publisher: Redleaf Press
• ISBN:
  9781605545905
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Frühkindliche Bildung

Loose parts are natural or synthetic found, bought, or upcycled materials—acorns, hardware, stones, aluminum foil, fabric scraps, for example—that children can move, manipulate, control, and change within their play. Loose parts capture children's curiosity, give free rein to their imagination, and encourage creativity. In the newest installment of the wildly popular, award-winning Loose Parts series, Lisa Daly and Miriam Beloglovsky focus on including families and competency building. With inspiring full-color photographs Loose Parts 4 is organized around competencies and life skills children need for success in the future: knowingness, engagement, risk, connections, leadership, innovative thinking, and creativity.Lisa and Miriam explain the value of loose parts, detail how to integrate loose parts into the environment and children's play, and specifically focus on loose parts for children in family environments—helping educators engage families and extend learning beyond the classroom.

Part 1

Introduction to Loose Parts for the Twenty-First Century

The twenty-first century has brought constant change and demands for education that go beyond academic readiness. Through a play-based approach with loose parts, children will cultivate the knowledge, capacities, and dispositions to thrive as adults in a global society and face the challenges of an unknown future.

Every new generation of children faces a future world that we can’t yet imagine. Children born today may not experience using paper currency, hardcover books, or cursive handwriting, or learning how to drive a car. Our society and technology are advancing at such a rapid pace that imagining what’s on the horizon for our children’s future is difficult. Upon adulthood every generation encounters changes in life that bring joy but also often come with criticism, uncertainty, rejection, and failure. How you tackle these obstacles will determine how you succeed in life. A major goal of both teaching and parenting is to prepare children for life, but what really matters?

One may believe that achievement and happiness are critical to being successful in the future, but who defines success? Success is often defined in terms of wealth or fame, but this definition seems rather narrow. For many individuals, obtaining a medical degree or becoming a professional athlete are signs of achievement, but aren’t there unhappy doctors and athletes in the world? An early childhood educator may be fulfilled working with young children, but if prosperity is defined as financial gain, the low wages of an educator do not qualify as affluence. Looking at our educational system, we can clearly see that we value skill building for our children; after all, they need to be prepared to enter the workforce with marketable skills. But is this enough to be successful?

What children need more than skills and success is to build capacities. Skills are abilities, either physical or mental, that are inherent or acquired. Capacities, on the other hand, involve the potential to develop skills and the power to learn. Capacity building involves strengthening an individual’s ability to hold, receive, or absorb. Everyone has the potential to build capacities. Capacity allows you to grasp change effectively, which is important for handling unforeseen possibilities. Young children can be properly prepared for the future by developing their full capacities for creativity, critical thinking, and active engagement in the world. Through open-ended play, children develop capacities for imagination, compassion, empathy, learning, resourcefulness, respect, initiative, vision, and sustained purpose, and for examining problems, and constructing solutions. Our goal as educators and as parents is to help all the children in our lives learn who they are so that they may go forward into adulthood with the confidence that they are equipped to thrive.

CHAPTER 1

Twenty-First-Century Skills That Matter

Children need the social, emotional, and cognitive capacities that are going to get them into the twenty-first century as thriving adults and effective citizens. In a world where what we know is changing so swiftly, children need the knowledge, abilities, character traits, and work behaviors that are essential for navigating the future. These are called twenty-first-century skills. Multiple educational frameworks have been developed that integrate twenty-first-century skills into key subjects such as English, mathematics, arts, science, and history for high school and college students.

Life Skills

The New World of Work presents the top twenty-first-century skills for developing curriculum to prepare community college students with the competencies, attributes, and traits that are highly valued by employers and important to academic success (Schulz and Gill 2014). Their Top 10 Skills include adaptability, analysis/solution mind-set, collaboration, communication, digital fluency, entrepreneurial mind-set, empathy, resilience, self-awareness, and social/diversity awareness. According to the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), the capacity for lifelong learning is more essential than memorizing facts and procedures for future success (OECD and CERI 2008). Research from educational professionals also reveals the skills, knowledge, and expertise students must master to succeed in work and life. Ellen Galinsky (2010), author of Mind in the Making: The Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs, asserts that children absolutely need to learn concepts and facts, but equally important are life skills. What are the life skills that experts believe children need to be successful in the future?

Knowingness

To succeed in the twenty-first century, children will need to accurately assess their personalities, strengths, and areas of growth and seek ways to continually develop skills. Life will always have setbacks, so resilience and learning from mistakes is important. Developing an awareness of how to positively adapt to change and how to be flexible is beneficial. The more you know about yourself, the better you are at adapting to life changes. Knowingness includes these skills:

• self-awareness

• critical reflection

• identity and learning to be

• adaptability and resilience

Connections

When children grow into adulthood, the world in which they find themselves will involve the capacities of connection, communication, and collaboration. When we experience loving connections, we feel supported and valued. Good communication is central to strong, healthy relationships and maintaining satisfying personal interactions. Adults need to be able to communicate effectively through writing, speech, and multimedia formats such as visual imagery. Collaboration is necessary to work competently and cooperatively with local and global coworkers to solve problems, complete projects, and create innovative ideas. Connections include the following:

• a sense of belonging

• children as skillful communicators

• building empathy

• collaboration and moral development

Engagement

In the workforce and in our home lives, adults need to work independently and complete tasks without direct supervision. We need initiative and self-direction to use time productively, manage workload efficiently, and persevere when we may not necessarily feel like it. We are more content when absorbed with meaningful work. Attributes of engagement include being passionate, committed, and invested in what you do. Engagement involves these areas:

• focus and concentration

• children as scientists

• productive agency

• the power of solitude

Risk

Thriving in a new global economy requires the ability to take risks. People who push boundaries and break the ordinary mind-set by using materials and visualizing ideas differently are risk-takers. Risk-taking is a critical trait of creativity. Children need to experience risk physically, socially, and intellectually if they are to advance their skills and learn how to keep themselves safe. Life involves risks in all areas. It requires risk to master physical challenges such as learning to walk or ride a bicycle, to master a social challenge such as initiating a conversation with an unknown person, or to master an intellectual challenge such as learning to read or discovering a solution to a problem. Children must experience and conquer challenges to learn how to navigate daily life experiences when they are older. Risk includes the following:

• learning about risk-taking capacities

• physical risks

• social-emotional risks

• intellectual risks

Innovative Thinking

The capacity to think analytically involves our competence with understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. These verbs, identified in Bloom’s taxonomy, help us describe and classify observable knowledge, skills, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs (Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning 2018). Each verb reflects a more advanced way of thinking, which is an indication of cognitive activity. Inquiry thinking is important, as using higher-end thinking skills helps us research and evaluate information effectively and proficiently. Innovative thinking comprises these areas:

• the cycle of innovation

• design thinking

• inquisitiveness and curiosity

• uncertainty and ambiguity

Creativity

Characteristics of creative thinkers include being open-minded, original, imaginative, communicative, and flexible. To equip ourselves for the world’s rapid transformation, we need to be able to look at and solve problems from different perspectives. Such outside-the-box thinking helps us respond to challenges and develop unique and useful solutions. Creativity is fostered as children play with materials that lend themselves to various uses. As children engage with open-ended materials, they discover alternatives, find solutions, create something new, or combine materials in novel but meaningful ways. Creativity includes these areas:

• messiness

• humor and joy

• curiosity and play

• intellectual and affective engagement

Leadership

Advances in technology during the twenty-first century have resulted in teams of individuals with diverse socioeconomic, generational, cultural, and national backgrounds working on common projects. Becoming aware of one’s own perspectives and cognizant of other cultural perspectives is vital to building a foundation of informed cross-cultural communication, that is, how people from differing backgrounds effectively communicate. Additionally citizens in the twenty-first century should have capacities to promote social justice, altruism, and sustainability. Our world needs individuals who advocate for equal economic, political, and social rights; serve others; and support, uphold, or strengthen resources, values, culture, and traditions to ensure continuation for future generations. Leadership includes these subjects:

• open-mindedness and perspective-taking

• altruism and social justice

• building sustainability

• a global perspective

Digital Fluency

One twenty-first-century skill that will not be explored in this text is digital or technical fluency, which is the ability to effectively and proficiently navigate and function in the digital world. We recognize the importance of digital fluency for understanding, selecting, and using technologies and technological systems, but we believe that technology should be introduced at an appropriate developmental age and not according to capability. Just because a child has the ability to use technology does not necessarily mean that they should.

Young children are motivated to be mentally active in the context of physical activity (DeVries and Zan 2012). This means that children learn best through movement and dynamic investigation. A child’s instinctive and inquisitive desire to actively engage with their environment may be suppressed when introduced to technology at too early of an age. You may be surprised to learn that many parents who live or work in the tech world of Silicon Valley, home to many of the world’s largest tech corporations, limit or ban their own children’s use of technology (Weller 2018). These parents have major concerns about technology’s influence on their children’s emotional and social development.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (2016) addresses the influence of media on the health and development of children from birth to five years of age. Their recommendation is to avoid digital media for children younger than eighteen to twenty-four months and limit screen use for children two to five years of age to one hour per day of high-quality programming that you watch with your child. Remember that the early years are a time of critical brain development, building secure relationships, and establishing healthy behaviors.

Healthy play experiences form the foundation for brain development and lay the groundwork for all future relationships and learning. Time spent engaged in play during childhood supports learning by doing and leads to the development of physical, emotional, social, and cognitive competence. The foundation for healthy growth and development is much like the construction of a bridge. The stability of a structure is contingent on a solid foundation, and a bridge’s design, materials, and construction affect the bridge’s stability. So it is with children. To lay a solid foundation in childhood, you need to understand the bigger picture of experiences, skills, and capacities that are necessary for a child to grow into a thriving adult.

Play

“Play does seem to open up another part of the mind that is always there, but that, since childhood, may have become closed off and hard to reach. When we treat children’s play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that’s to be found in the creative spirit. We’re helping ourselves stay in touch with that spirit, too. It’s the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives” (F. Rogers 2003, 83).

Young children learn best through self-directed play. There is an abundance of evidence supporting this fact from scientists, psychologists, physicians, anthropologists, and historians. Children’s lives are enriched through free play that is pleasurable, self-motivated, imaginative, spontaneous, creative, and free from specific adult-imposed goals and outcomes. The knowledge that the most important way children learn is through play is vital for families and ed...