It started simply enough with the bowl of beautiful autumn colors and loose parts pictured below:

The children began sorting the items in the bowl almost immediately—without any prompting. There was no discussion about what we were doing. This was very intentional and calculated. When children sort materials, they begin to understand that certain things have similarities and differences.

Let’s think of these groupings as sets. Sets are a collection of items that have been classified together because they have something in common. Defining these sets of matches is a prerequisite for counting and comparing. Before we can figure out how many pine cones there are, we need to separate the pine cones from the buckeyes.

Classifying is the skill of grouping or sorting items by similar characteristics. Being able to match items and explain why they go together is an important part of cognitive development. Children between the ages of three and four enjoy sorting and classifying objects by one characteristic. By allowing more time for exploration and play, you will will give the children opportunities to increase their classification by more than one characteristic.  

Matching is a simple form of sorting. Matching helps children identify attributes that are the same and take notice of details that are a bit different. Children can match by size, shape, color or one to one. 

Seriation is arranging objects in order by size, location or position. There was great discussion and collaboration as we discussed the sizes of pine cones and what order they should be arranged in. 

Patterns are sequences that repeat. The ability to recognize patterns supports math skills. Pattern recognition helps children make predictions about what will come next. Patterns are an important part of spatial thinking. Once children begin to spot patterns, they will see them everywhere in their surroundings and their daily routines.  Pattern awareness is a form of early algebraic thinking.

The children were engaged and spent a great deal of time arranging their materials in many sorted piles and patterns. By engaging in these simple mathematical experiences, the children became more proficient at problem-solving, reasoning, making predictions and making connections in their world. To help the children in your care develop these foundational math skills, keep it simple! Take your students outdoors! The curriculum is waiting for you in those autumn treasures just waiting to be found! 

The term “loose parts” is all over the Internet and early childhood world these days and for good reason. I have witnessed firsthand how the learning changed when we brought in natural loose parts! Loose parts are so full of math opportunities and problem-solving and vocabulary-building opportunities. So, what exactly are loose parts?

Loose parts are natural or man-made materials, with no set of instructions, that can be used alone or with other materials.  These open-ended materials can be moved, combined, stacked, taken apart and put back together, and most importantly repurposed.  

         When we speak of loose parts, we are looking for materials that will spark imagination and creativity. Outdoor natural materials would include things like rocks, shells, feathers, grass, leaves, pinecones, pine needles, and seeds.  Indoors, things like blocks, manipulatives, pouring devices like cups and funnels, buttons, play cars, people and animals, recycled materials like lids, boxes, paper tubes, envelopes; art supplies (popsicle sticks, buttons, beads, spools, etc.).  The list is endless and you more than likely have these materials already or can find them and you won’t need to purchase a single thing.

September is a fabulous month for collecting materials for future loose parts play.  We take nature walks almost daily and each child is equipped with a backpack for all their treasures that they collect along the way.  We often come home with buckeyes, acorns, dried berries, colored leaves, and who knows what else we may find! Loose parts that are collected by the child, spark beauty and joy in the eyes of the child. There are no directions on how to play with their newly found treasure, so this allows the child’s imagination to run wild! The child can use the acorn for soup, or an art project, or food for the stuffed animals.

If nature isn’t your thing, take a hard look at where your children play.  There is a good chance it will be filled with loose parts. If your child is into cars or ponies, start with that!  Remove the toys that aren’t used or played with. They clutter the mind of the child and they can’t stay focused on what they are creating! Yes! I am giving you permission to remove the majority of the toys that cover your home! Less is more! The child’s creativity and focus will change, I promise you!

Many teachers and parents will rush out and get baskets and fill the whole room with rows and rows of loose part storage.  A child walks in and dumps every single bucket, and walks away.  Maybe they were looking for their one red car or green pony.  Start small.  Take baby steps with loose parts!  Our friend and mentor, Bev Bos, always recommended change with the words, “Start in a corner!” The reason is, we create chaos the minute we upend the whole room and bring in new supplies. So start small, start with what your child is playing with, and start where their interest lies. Did your mother or grandmother have a bottom drawer in the kitchen that was full of “toys” to keep you busy while they prepared meals?  Chances are that drawer was full of cups and spoons, and random recycled loose parts!

So how many loose parts do we need? I once read that we want enough loose parts so no one is left waiting, wanting, or wailing! Some experts recommend five play pieces for each child.  So, if your classroom or child is very interested in dinosaurs, you need five for each child that gravitates to that area.  If every single dinosaur is in play on most days, you will want to add more.  Or add more elements that they are using with the dinosaurs.  Build off the interest that they are focused on. Think outside of the box!  Fabric is a great loose part that often finds its way into our block area for a river or lake, or to be added as clouds or a trail. Add shells or blocks or pieces of bark.  When I witness a play buzz happening, I sometimes add supplies close enough to possibly be noticed to add to their play.  Soon, this will not be necessary, but in the beginning stages of learning to play with loose parts, I think it adds to the creativity.

So where is the math? Mathematical concepts are created through their play with loose parts. You will begin to see deliberate patterns, sequences, and classifications by color, size, or type. Spatial recognition and intentionality of play will honestly have you shaking your head! I promise you, it is crazy! You will see sorting and separating, measuring, and logical classification. All of these are precursors for higher mathematical proficiency!

If you keep your materials available, loose parts outdoor play will continue into the winter months.  If the forecast calls for snow, be sure to grab out all of the sand toys as these make great snow forms, and you can’t reach them if they are frozen in the sandbox! Building a snowman’s face uses loose parts! Make your life easy and pack a sack while the weather is warmer and put it in a safe place.  (It took me a ridiculously long time to figure out this simple task!) We keep our aluminum bowls full of rocks, shells, and walnuts, and other loose parts ready for creative outdoor play. We use large “tree cookies” (See the picture below. This little girl is playing with “tree cookies”), or cookie sheets as a tray for each child to create their loose parts formations. This allows them to be picked up and moved and gives the child a frame for their work.  We also need to acknowledge their work in process and it may need to stay in place for a day or two. They will know and you will know when the play is complete.  I am often amazed at how quickly some creations come down and the oddness of things they want to leave up.  There is a lot of time invested in these masterpieces and it is important that we treat this time and energy with respect. These masterpieces are math.  They are manipulatives and problem solving and intentional risk-taking at trying out new ideas.  Take it slowly, but I beg you to try it.  You will never look back. It is a hot topic these days for a very good reason!  Let them play! 

Late fall and winter is a great time to find these special places in the woods.  This spring and summer the same log was covered in foliage and poison ivy.  Yikes!   Fall and winter offer different views of forest areas and tend to be a good time to introduce children to nature if it is not a part of their daily lives.  There are fewer bugs, the children are wearing more layers of clothing to protect them from scrapes and new sensory experiences and we don’t worry as much about poison ivy. We are often asked, as a nature based preschool, what we do all day? How do they learn?  Well, we go on adventures and discover math gold mines like this hollow log!

Physical play like this allows mathematical phrases to become understood easily and naturally without worksheets and manipulatives.  When a child can climb through a cylinder shape, the word through makes a lot more sense.  So of course we allow our friends to explore by going through, and climbing on top of, to look down below. These spatial relationships, where something is located in relationship to something else, are essential to math in the later years. This log play invited us to use many of these concepts as the children explored:

• inside, outside
• in front of, in back of, behind
• low, high
• above, below
• across
• on top of

Understanding spatial relationships helps children talk about where things are located. This strengthens their understanding of these concepts as they use the vocabulary words repeatedly throughout their play!  Geometric shapes are a kindergarten common core standard and when we actually play with and in our shapes, the learning becomes deeper, more intentional and relevant.

“It looks like the inside of that slide at the park!” remarks Avery, as she immediately leads the pack through the open branch.  “The tube slide!” agreed Violet.  And from there, the comparisons and learning took over.  As I introduce the word cylinder, they continue to share other concepts and ideas of what this hollow log reminds them of.  We discuss cans and batteries and toilet paper rolls, which naturally brings roars of laughter, because when you are four there is nothing funnier than a toilet paper roll!  Recognizing shapes is a math concept that for many young children will come before numeric skills. When we return to the block area later in the week, the word cylinder not only returns but suddenly we are re-creating our hike with blocks.  The children build bridges and trees and paths and of course, there by the side of the trail, right where it should be is a cylinder.  The hollow tree branch that brought a whole morning of geometric exploration through age appropriate play, will be a source of math intelligence that will be retrieved many times throughout their lives.

Our spring dandelion days create hours and hours of exploration, inquisition and just plain observation!  There was plenty of math happening everywhere we turned.  One day we collected dandelions just to see how many we could collect.  The five year olds collected more than one hundred, while the two year olds were happy with six.  That is developmentally appropriate math right there!  When we find ourselves in these nature-based outdoor classrooms, the learning is always developmentally appropriate and always child centered.  It is the beauty of learning in a place that gives us everything we need. “When you look at a field of dandelions, you can either see a hundred weeds, or a hundred wishes.”
We had plenty of math vocabulary going as we searched for the longest and shortest dandelions.  We looked at the circumference of the flower, and made flower bracelets out of them.

We discussed the number of pedals.  We found the pattern of petals and I introduced them to the term “Fibonacci”, a number pattern that we often find in nature.  On this day, the flowers were too tall to spend much time on patterns.  We kept finding longer and longer stems, some with flowers, some with wispy white seed heads!  We discovered that we could divide the stems in half! Wait! We could even split them into four sections! Would it be possible to blow through a stem? Would it make a whistling sound? Would it taste bitter?  The investigation and process of discovery with dandelions was fast and furious, yet lasted for hours. This was math at their level, on their timetable.  Why would we rush this?I watched as some very young children could subitize better than their older friends.  Subitizing is the ability to “see” a small number of objects and know how many are there without counting.  When we roll a dice, we don’t need to count the pips, we know the number when we see it! Some children seem to grasp this concept with ease while others need to work with it a bit more.  We subitize a lot in our program, and being the math geek that I am, it just fascinates me to watch the difference in learning styles as this concept becomes effortless!

Giggles and screams of discovery were filling the hillside as our dandelion math morning took on a life of it’s own.  They began to classify, grouping according to length or size of the flower head.  I watched as a game developed of who could find the tallest one.  When you are yards away from your friend AND on a hill, it is hard to distinguish until you pick it and compare sizes! Then the realization comes that you need to pick at the very, very bottom of the stem!  This was a concept that was way beyond the comprehension of some of our younger friends, as hard as their peers tried to teach them.

Ah, the beauty of multi-age groups.  The beauty of allowing learning to enter as the brain and physical development allow.  The beauty of friendships and childhood on a sunny spring day, when all the stars align and the learning comes so naturally.

After attending a math workshop (Do we want to admit this was a Math At Home training?), I received a container of what I would normally call, “Counting Bears.”  I generally do not like these so called counting “manipulatives.” They tend to be bears, in primary colors and they are used for counting, sorting by color, patterning and other math related ideas. As much as I don’t like them, my students love to play with these. They are small and fit in little hands, and they just gravitate to them. We have removed all of the branded play characters in our program, so small animals and people are needed for imaginary play. There was something different about these counters.  Instead of bears, they were people. Families! Each colored set contained a tall man and woman, small boys and girls, a baby and a cat, all of one color.  We all wish there was a dog, but a cat it was.  I love these people. I also knew my students would love these!  We are always looking for people to add to our loose parts play.  I also loved that children could create a family to look like theirs.  If they have a grandmother living with them, or stepparents or same sex parents, the child could make a family that looked like theirs. I knew these “people” would be a hit!

This is where it gets tricky. How should I add these to our play so that they are used intentionally?   How many is too many?  In my past teaching days, I would have dumped the container into a basket and added it to our block area.  Sorting by color, size and gender would have commenced.  Soon there would be 72 “people” in every corner of our classroom.  It’s too, too many!  We have six to eight students in our class.  When we add too much of a good thing, it loses it’s value and respect.

At about this same time, I realized I needed a new treasure from our trusted fairy.   I never thought I would jump into the whole fairy garden fad…but the children love it.  We have a fairy house in our outdoor classroom where the children leave drawings or notes for our fairy that responds with small tokens of magic. Our fairy house is a simple old log that was hollow, where we added a door. This crazy little fairy hut has become a literacy and math hub for our program. I strongly encourage you to find a corner of your yard or home and repurpose an old farm or dollhouse, or even an old birdcage for your own fairy house. The fairy brings shiny buttons, mini pinecones, acorns, and other surprises to our days. These families would be perfect for our fairy house surprises!  I decided to wrap a family up for each of the children in our program.

As expected these families were an instant success!  On a sunny, humid 95-degree day, the children quickly grabbed their tree cookies, found the shady side of the play yard and began creating homes for their families.  Neighborhoods were quickly arranged, and the building began!  Where is the math?  The math came in sequential ordering, spatial awareness, collecting, comparing attributes, the list goes on and on!  Our fairy brought us so many math concepts that were embedded and integral to the children’s play!

If the counting bears are collecting dust in your closet, or you have too many Hot Wheels or stuffed animals, try reducing the numbers and watch how the play will change.  Sometimes 2 + 2= too, too much!  Less equals more.  Children love to recreate their lives with small animals and figures but if we overwhelm them with too many choices it creates chaos and over stimulates their brain.  We did not need 72 new characters in our program.  Each child took their “family” home and our fairy left one family here for loose parts play, and gave another teacher the remaining people.  Share your goodness with others, because that’s great math!