Our welcome week stand

As we welcomed our new cohort of early childhood students for the 2013/14 academic year, we were keen to introduce them to our research project and provide them with an opportunity to explore how a range of reused and recycled materials can be used creatively. A variety of materials, including newspaper, egg boxes, cardboard boxes and plastic food containers were made available along with scissors and masking tape.

Students decided to work in small groups or pairs to select materials to build a city or use their creativity to build something else. In addition to developing their own practical skills, it allowed them to put themselves in the position of the child and consider how they might use such materials. 

Here is an example of a castle created by one group of students:

Another pair of creative students developed this rather stunning owl:

The focus on encouraging students to gain hands-on practice will, ideally, provide them with ideas to implement at their work placements and enable them to become more confident in planning activities that include a range of resources to support sensory development and tap into a child's imagination.

Inspirations for the research 6 - possibility thinking

A research study that involved looking at children's response to resources was a study by  Professor Anna Craft and her colleagues at a London Children's Centre[1].

Their study was influenced by the 5x5x5=Creativity project and practice in Reggio Emilia (see our post for 20th September below). The focus was on the use of adult initiated 'provocations' as stimuli for children's play. For four weeks, the researchers observed and documented  four year olds' responses to natural materials such as logs, leaves, stones (Group 1) or puppets and props (Group 2).
 
Evidence was found of 'possibility thinking'. This type of thinking is central to young children’s creativity as they constantly generate possibilities in their play. They ask ‘what if?’, and ‘what can I do with this?’ and so go beyond ‘what is’ to explore ‘what could be’. 

The study showed how creative practitioners could use resources as provocations to stimulate changes in practice and children’s experiences; there's a summary in a chapter on play and creativity that Paulette has written for the new edition of An Introduction to Early Childhood - due out early next year.

In our research, we are interested in the ways that reclaimed materials stimulate young children's 'possibility thinking'.

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[1] Craft, A., McConnon, L. and Matthews, A. (2012) Child-Initiated Play and Professional Creativity: Enabling Four-Year-Olds' Possibility Thinking. Thinking Skills and Creativity. Vol.7(1), p.48-61

Inspirations for the research 5 - stuff

In our previous posts we have written about sources of inspiration for using reclaimed resources in creative ways. Materials are important in early childhood classrooms but there is relatively little research to be found relating to their use. Several of the famous philosopher-pedagogues or 'pioneers' of early childhood education are well known for specific educational resources, notably: Froebel 'gifts';  Montessori materials; and Steiner Waldorf toys .

The only book we know of that specifically addresses the topic of resources is  Resources for Early Learning: Children, Adults and Stuff by Pat Gura, who is also well known for her work on blockplay.
The 'stuff' in the title takes different forms and includes found materials. The word 'stuff' is chosen to question the over-used term 'play material'. Pat Gura points out that almost anything can become a play material. An object or substance is play material for a long as the play lasts. Published in 1996, this remains a useful book. It challenges our preconceptions about resources that foster young children's learning. It inspires us to explore and unlock the possibilities of 'stuff' with children.

There are plenty of practical books about resources with suggestions for practitioners. Amongst our favourites are the Little Books series. On our specific topic of interest there is Linda Thornton and Pat Brunton's  Making the Most of Reclaimed and Natural Materials. We also like The Stick Book. 

Inspirations for the research 4 - loose parts

REMIDA is unique to the city of Reggio Emilia (see our 20th September post below) but there are innovative projects with reclaimed resources in the UK. The Midas Touch project in Liverpool involved young children, artists and early years educators taking part in creative play with recycled objects. Nick Owen, Laura Grindley and Michiko Fujii write about the opportunities that this project provided for creative development in Ioanna Palaiologou’s book Early Years Foundation Stage: Theory and Practice.

 

In Bristol the Children's Scrapstore have produced Play Pods. The theory behind Play Pods includes the concept of ‘loose parts’. This term was coined by architect Simon Nicolson, who wrote: “In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it”[i]. He argued that creative opportunities should be for the many, not an elite few, and that all children should have the chance to experiment and make discoveries. Children’s play with loose parts is also explored in the Sydney Playground Project.

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[i] Nicholson S., 1971. How NOT to Cheat Children - The Theory of Loose Parts. Landscape Architecture, 62: 30-35

Inspirations for the research 3 - REMIDA

Treasure Baskets and heuristic play are great examples of uses of reclaimed resources from the UK (see our 18th September post below). We are also interested in work with varied and multi-sensory materials in the famous preschools of  Reggio Emilia; places where materials and media of different kinds are seen as potential ‘languages’ through which children can express their ideas and understandings. This view of children as capable thinkers with many means of communication is expressed in Loris Malaguzzi’s poem 'The Hundred Languages of Children'. In the city REMIDA (translated as King Midas) is a creative recycling centre where teachers and members of the community can access materials and children can work with artists to turn unwanted items into treasures.

A wonderful book that describes a similar approach, in a US classroom, is Beautiful Stuff: Learning with Found Materials written by Cathy Weisman Topal and Lella Gandini. They document a project where young children were each given a paper bag and asked to go home and fill it with items for the studio area in their classroom. The children collected broken jewellery and watches, ribbons, feathers and all manner of recycled bits and pieces from home. They then sorted, ordered and explored the materials and used their discoveries to create a variety of images and objects. The book has sparked projects in many other early childhood classrooms. You can see inspirational examples, with beautiful photographs, in the blog Transforming our Learning Environment into a Space of Possibilities .

Inspirations for the research 2 - Treasure Baskets

Elinor Goldschmied devised the Treasure Basket as a means of providing babies with everyday objects to be explored. The objects chosen for the Treasure Basket are 'found' items made from natural materials - no plastic things or manufactured toys are included. With an adult carer close by and attentive, although not interfering, a baby or small group of babies can investigate the contents of the basket using all their senses and their developing manipulative skills.

The contents of a Treasure Basket can absorb a baby's attention for up to an hour, or even more. This engagement is also seen when toddlers become involved in heuristic play - selecting and experimenting freely with found materials and developing understandings of the world around them. Observations of children show that this type of play involves concentration, decision making and rich sensory experience plus opportunities to practise hand/eye coordination and fine motor control.

Treasure Baskets and heuristic play have been part of early years training and practice for more than twenty years and so, in our research, we anticipate that one key use of reclaimed materials in early years settings will be as provision for this type of play activity.

Inspirations for the research 1 - beginnings

This small-scale research study was inspired by Kay Fisher, Director and Editor of Essential Childminder who is studying for her MA at Anglia Ruskin University. She told us about her experiences replacing conventional toys with reclaimed resources from a local scrap-store.

Kay's ideas started us thinking about attitudes to resources. Are there many reclaimed and recycled resources in contemporary early years settings and classrooms? Do teachers and other early childhood educators reuse and recycle materials? Where reclaimed resources are used is this merely to save money or for other reasons? How do children respond to and use such materials?  With all these questions - and more - our project was born!

Introduction

This blog has been started to document findings from a small-scale project designed to explore how reclaimed resources are used to support children’s learning in local early years settings. The project is being organised by the Early Childhood Research Group at Anglia Ruskin University with funding from the Children and Youth Research Institute (CYRI).

Our research stems from an interest in early childhood education for sustainability and is also inspired by work in the REMIDA recycling centre in Reggio Emilia, Italy, where reclaimed materials are used as a basis for creative activities with children. We are aware that there is a long tradition of using recycled resources in early years education. In our experience, early years practitioners collect boxes, kitchen roll tubes, egg cartons, yogurt pots, shiny sweet wrappers, off-cuts of material, cotton reels, and anything else that could be used for creative play. Similarly they encourage parents to contribute unwanted items from homes and workplaces that could be used with the children and often frequent scrap projects to source additional resources.

We are interested to find out more about practice with reclaimed resources in early years settings. We would like to know: What resources are used? How do children play with reclaimed materials? What do adults consider to be the importance of these resources? With this in mind, we have been visiting nurseries and doing the following, with staff:

• Looking at the reclaimed resources in the setting and creating an inventory / list;
• Observing children using the reclaimed materials and documenting what they do;
• Discussing the inventory and observations with nursery managers and hearing their ideas about the uses of reclaimed materials in early years settings.

This information is currently being gathered together and analysed to begin to answer our questions about how and why reclaimed resources are used in early years settings.