Unlocking Potential: Exploring the Benefits of Early Learning Centre Toys

In earlier generations, children’s play materials were often homemade or relatively simple, crafted from durable and long-lasting materials. Today, mass-produced plastic toys with limited purpose have permanently entered children’s learning environments. These toys are often designed to be used in specific ways, with limited imaginative play opportunities. This article delves into the world of early learning centre toys, with a particular focus on "loose parts play" and its impact on cognitive development. By examining the existing literature and synthesizing empirical evidence, we aim to deepen our understanding of the relationship between children’s play and its impact on cognitive development.

The Essence of Play

Play is often defined as an activity pursued for its own sake and characterized largely by its processes rather than end goals. Play has also been described as an integrating process, providing an ecosystem where children can make connections between previous experiences, represent their ideas in different ways, imagine possibilities, explore and create new meanings. Such complexity can be seen in children’s play themes, materials, content, social interactions, and the understandings children demonstrate in their play. The more complex the play, the more it impacts development. Even a small dose of quality play improves children’s performance on subsequent cognitive development tasks.

Many researchers recognize play as a medium for learning and the foundation for exploration. This literature review first provides an overview of loose parts play and highlights its unique characteristics. Subsequently, drawing upon existing research on play and cognitive development, we examine the impact of specific types of play with loose parts on the cognitive development of young children. Through a comprehensive synthesis of the available literature, we explore how different play opportunities influence cognitive capacities, including executive function, cognitive self-regulation, reasoning, and problem-solving. Our review underscores the crucial role of play in facilitating the development of fundamental cognitive abilities, which in turn have long-term implications for learning and cognitive outcomes.

The Evolution of Play Materials

Children’s play themes generally follow the ideas inherent in the materials and toys available. However, as noted, materials and toys used for children’s play have changed significantly over the years, reflecting societal changes, technological advancements and shifts in understanding child development.

Understanding Loose Parts Play (LPP)

Early learning and child-care communities today widely incorporate loose parts for their perceived potential to offer high-quality play opportunities. Such opportunities allow children to use their imaginations and explore their surroundings and support children’s cognitive development. In Canada, Alberta, Manitoba and Nova Scotia’s education guidelines for early childhood explicitly discuss the importance of loose parts play. Six other provincial frameworks don’t use the words “loose parts,” but equally stress the importance of this kind of play. While many parents, educators and policy-makers recognize the benefits of involving children in play with loose parts, the basic evidence regarding children’s indoor play with loose materials is unknown.

Defining Loose Parts

LPP is defined as children’s play with open-ended and interactive materials (e.g., cardboard, shells, tires, sand, pompoms) not initially intended for play that can be manipulated limitlessly. LPP is an engaging form of play for children that offers complexity because children can combine different play types and various materials in one occurrence. This form of play emphasizes materials that allow children to play in multiple ways and levels of complexity while experimenting, discovering, inventing, and having fun. Indeed, LPP has many elements of free or unstructured play, as described by other researchers. These play types, like LPP, are often described as springboards for all subsequent learning, where children’s ideas, interests, and desires are respected, nurtured, and expanded into an ongoing, orderly, and recognizable curriculum incorporating knowledge from all disciplines. However, free play may include any unstructured activity that inspires a child to use their imagination without constant adult direction. Some examples of free play include children playing together in the backyard, where various activities, such as running, jogging, climbing, jumping, and fine motor movement, help the child develop speed, strength, stamina, flexibility, and coordinative abilities. Likewise, unstructured play may resemble LPP, allowing children to explore, create, and discover without predetermined rules or guidelines. Like free play, however, this is open to a broad scope of activities, including artistic or musical games, imaginative games (e.g., making a fort with boxes or blankets), dressing up or playing make-believe, or exploring new spaces like woods, backyards, parks, and playgrounds.

The Affordances of Loose Parts

Nicholson (1972) coined the term loose parts and described the importance of interactive materials that can have many affordances. According to Affordance Theory (Gibson 1979), the world is perceived as an object of possibilities for action or affordances. In terms of materials, affordances refer to how an object or material can be used or interacted with. Children’s LPP can involve a variety of materials: everyday synthetic or natural materials, reusable and upcycled materials, and commercial toys that may promote thinking in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM). We know that children’s play frequently involves objects, materials, or toys, and play themes generally follow the ideas inherent in the materials and toys available. Thus, LPP is unique because the materials are clearly defined by their affordances compared to those used in other play types (e.g., musical, pretend).

It is important for children’s play materials to have many affordances because it allows for a wide range of exploration and creativity. For example, a simple wooden block can be used as a building material, a tool for stacking and balancing, or a prop in imaginative play. According to Trawick-Smith et al. (2014), quality play encourages children to be involved in critical learning and cognitive development elements such as self-regulation, make-believe, problem-solving, and creative expression. High-quality play offers many educational benefits such as problem solving and learning. When children have access to play materials with many affordances, they are more likely to engage in open-ended and imaginative play that reinforces these educational benefits.

LPP allows children to explore their interests and ideas to develop their creativity and self-expression. Additionally, having access to a variety of play materials with many affordances can help with attention shifts and increase engagement in play, which is essential for children’s development and well-being. Researchers have shown that materials with many affordances in children’s play, such as those used in LPP, also have developmental benefits. For example, these materials can inspire, maintain, and spark ideas, support children using symbolic skills to transform ideas into scenarios during play, draw social interaction into a shared play sphere, promote self-esteem, emotional well-being, and resilience, and foster children’s higher mental processes, such as thinking or internal dialogues.

Age and Engaging Play

Not all toys and materials are equally effective in promoting engaging play, especially for children of different ages. While it is difficult to define engaging play by age, one parameter can be helpful to define play that sustains children’s attention over a period of time with elaborate themes and ideas. Open-ended materials and toys that do not suggest a play theme allow for many kinds of play, including constructive and pretend play, that can lead to positive outcomes. Trawick-Smith et al. (2015) also found that play materials and toys with many affordances do not serve younger children well but promote engaging play for older ones. Younger children perform their most frequent pretend-to-play with realistic toys. In addition, Howe et al. (2022) investigated how open-ended versus closed-ended toys impact children’s pretend play. They found that open-ended toys are particularly important in supporting children’s play and learning, as they encourage divergent and convergent thinking, imagination, and problem-solving skills. The nature of toys determines children’s patterns of communication and behavior. The authors concluded that although the toy themes are somewhat suggestive, they may not promote similar behaviors and outcomes in pretend play. Therefore, the type of toys and play materials children can access can significantly impact their play experiences, the play types they involve in, and their learning outcomes. Open-ended materials and toys that allow for many kinds of play have been found to have developmental benefits, foster creativity, and encourage problem-solving skills. Thus, considering play materials with many affordances provide opportunities for LPP to promote children’s growth and development.

The Focus on Individual Materials vs. Interactive Play

Researchers have heavily investigated the developmental benefits of playing with individual open-ended materials, i.e., play with blocks, LEGO®, or sand in isolation. However, LPP can involve interactive materials used simultaneously in various play types.

The Cognitive Benefits of Loose Parts Play

As already highlighted, broad interest in LPP to enrich children’s play experiences has grown, with claims to be a developmental foundation for creativity, problem-solving, and divergent thinking. However, research has not kept pace with the enthusiasm of childcare professionals and policymakers. Recent systematic and scoping reviews document that, thus far, there are only a handful of empirical studies on children’s LPP, and the focus on the developmental benefits of this type of play is limited, especially for cognitive development. Instead, researchers have focused primarily on outdoor LPP, examining physical and social development. Indoor play environments offer unique opportunities for young children to engage in imaginative, creative, and sensory-rich activities. However, despite the prevalence of indoor play spaces and the common recommendation of loose parts play for the preschool age group, there is limited scientific research available to support these practices. Studies on young children’s indoor LPP are limited to a few non-empirical studies. No empirical work considers children’s cognitive functioning (e.g., verbal IQ, executive function). Furthermore, the influence of critical factors such as a child’s age, family income, and educational attainment on parent/child play types, duration, and engagement with loose parts has not yet entered the research dialogue. The types of play children commonly utilize with loose parts have yet to be documented or explained. Such knowledge would support understanding which materials are most conducive to specific types of progressively complex play, allow children to design their own learning goals, and prepare young children for learning. The evidence that illustrates the developmental benefits of this type of play is very limited.

For example, Gibson et al. (2017) robustly indicated the lack of research on the benefits of LPP. They highlighted that little is known about how LPP influences children’s development beyond physical and social domains. Early studies have focused narrowly on children’s outdoor LPP and mostly on physical and social development. Furthermore, the existing empirical studies focus mainly on older children. Loose Parts Play (LPP) focuses on utilizing materials that offer multiple possibilities, enabling children to engage in diverse play experiences and develop cognitive capacities like executive function and cognitive self-regulation. Research on LPP is limited, especially regarding its developmental benefits for cognitive development. Existing studies primarily focus on outdoor LPP and its impact on physical and social development. Play, including loose parts play, is fundamental in childhood and significantly impacts children’s cognitive development. Symbolic and pretend play promote cognitive skills such as symbolic substitution, dual representation, language development, executive function, self-regulation, and problem-solving.

Types of Play and Their Cognitive Impact

Object play is an infant or child’s playful exploration of an object and or engagement with it to learn about its properties and progresses from early sensorimotor explorations to symbolic objects (i.e., using objects to represent other objects). Object play is a common type of play and can be defined as the manipulation of objects and exploration of their physical properties.Constructive play involves the creation of a novel product using materials and tools.

Addressing the Research Gap

There are only a handful of empirical studies on indoor loose parts play with limited focus on its developmental benefits beyond children’s physical and social development. Research has narrowly focused on children’s outdoor play with loose parts and mostly on physical and social development. Current research has not examined children’s indoor play with loose parts and its relationship to children’s cognitive skills.

Children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds start kindergarten disproportionately behind their more affluent and privileged peers in knowledge and educational performance. Low-income families often cannot afford toys for children. Could household objects (like plastic tubs or egg cartons) offer equitable play opportunities for all children, if early childhood programs and professionals supported parents with up-cycling items into play things?

Research is being conducted to address gaps in our understanding of children’s loose parts play. Specifically, the play types and play engagement levels of children between the ages of four and five who participate in our study are examined. We also take into account the effects of children’s cognitive development, parental income and education on how young children play with everyday objects, both when they play by themselves and with their parents. Data has been collected using video recordings of children’s play in two sessions (one with loose parts and the other session with the limited-purpose toy as a control), parent questionnaires and a cognitive measurement tool for benchmarking children’s cognitive and language development. We are now analyzing crucial relationships between children’s play with different loose objects and children’s cognitive development, and considering key social determinants such as gender, socioeconomic status and maternal education.

Play is an integrative process, and the skills acquired in it-overcoming impulses, behavior control, exploration and discovery, problem-solving, reasoning, drawing conclusions, and attention to processes and outcomes are foundational cognitive structures that drive learning and motivation. Loose parts play is a prominent form of play that many scholars and educators explicitly endorse for cognitive development (e.g., divergent thinking, problem-solving). It is unique among play types because children can combine different play types and natural or manufactured materials in one occurrence. While educators and policymakers promote the benefits of loose parts play, no previous research has explored the direct relationship between preschool-age children’s indoor loose parts play experiences and cognitive development. We address this gap by bringing together the relevant literature and synthesizing the empirical studies on common play types with loose parts, namely object and exploratory, symbolic and pretend, and constructive play. We also focus on studies that examine children’s experiences through loose parts, highlighting the impact of different play types on learning through the reinforcement of cognitive skills, such as executive function, cognitive self-regulation, reasoning, and problem-solving. By examining the existing literature and synthesizing empirical evidence, we aim to deepen our understanding of the relationship between children’s play with loose parts and its impact on cognitive development.

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