Loose Parts – Enhancing Personal Capacity Building and Climate Awareness of Pupils in Schools

In the Loose Parts project our main goal is to assist schools to develop an effective environment for children’s play, as well as to involve their communities in this endeavour. Through involving the community (parents and other stakeholders) the school strengthens its connections, the commitment of the community towards the school, as well as increase the level of civic engagement.

Our objectives are:

• To increase sustainable thinking by introducing recycled items as resources for children’s play (loose parts)
• To enhance the play environment, quality play and creativity of pupils
• To assist schools to introduce the concept of using Loose Parts in schools to the parents and to the community, including help to collect loose parts.

In order to help the schools to use Loose Parts play in their premises, and be able to make all the practical steps, we develop the first two IOs: the Manual and the Toolbox. The Manual will contain background theoretical and practical information for using Loose Parts, while the Toolbox will contain very concrete tools for communication about loose parts towards parents and community, using loose parts within education, checklists, etc. We are going to have a stakeholder multiplier event in each country in order to collect feedback about the usability of the toolbox and the manual.

After the development of the IOs, in the second year (school year) we are going to pilot all these resources in the partner schools and finalize them afterwards in the last months of the project. There will be a parallel development of IO3—a training course for teachers. It will be developed in a modular way so that parts of it could be implemented independently according to local needs. The training curriculum will be piloted, as well as trainers trained at the beginning of the second year (and schoolyear). Based on their feedback, the training modules will be updated, and then multiplier workshops (ME5-8) in each country will be run—parallelly to piloting.

As we would like to showcase the impact of playwork and loose parts play in schools with relevant data, we are planning to produce a research paper, which will result in IO4. The research with inclusion of researchers from universities from all partner countries—will be prepared and all documentation set up in the first year. There will be pre-, ongoing and pro-assessments in the pilot schools to be able to collect data. We plan to include same-characteristic control schools to be able to show the differences.

The research will result in a collective research paper in English, with shortened versions translated to all partner languages, as well as a set of national level publications. All these
results will be also presented at national level conferences (multiplier events 9-12).