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As an early childhood educator, we could bring light into children’s learning and development as they grow to promote their own agency in being creative through different kinds of materials around them. If we use and light play in early childhood settings, it will encourage children’s collaborative play, creative experimentation and discovery-based learnig (Light Play, 2017). Thinking outside the box is one of the aspects of being an educator, as we extend children’s learning and interests by doing different kinds of experiment with variety of materials in different aspects.

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On the other hand, I did observe and explore natural light as well, especially outdoors. Natural light that we experienced outdoors mostly came from the sun. And from that we saw a lot of shadows, that came from objects and even from ourselves. Shadows comes in different intensity and sizes, it depends on the place, environment, time, weather and many other aspects.

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The creation on the left is actually just combining loose parts and scrunched up paper together, then I put them on top of a projector. Turns out, it looks like a rose on the ceiling.

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There are two kinds of light in this world, natural light and artificial light. In early childhood education settings, we can use both kinds of light. Most of the time if we are indoor or in a dark place and time, we use artificial light, such as the lamp, electricity, solar, and many more. It is good to balance between artificial light and natural light. Both pictures above show us the examples of artificial light that we can bring to early childhood educations settings. We can use projectors to promote children’s creativity while combining loose parts with light. Aside from loose parts, we can actually bring in paper and clay as well to experiment with the materials that we can gather to make a creation with light.

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Light is one of the basic things we need in our daily lives.

Without light, there will be total darkness.

No sun, no day

No moon shine, no night

No electricity, no productiveness

Light is important

We start our day with light

We end our day with light

Sometimes we don’t realize

How important light is

If we look around

Everything connects with light

Imagine if there’s no light

We can’t see anything

Even our own reflection

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From all of my encounters with clay, I understand the uniqueness of each and every environment that we are working on. Just like what the children in the chapter five of Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education book did, where they experience working with clay in different places. The results are amazing and unexpected as they encountered different kinds of stories in different places (Kind, 2016).

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Both videos of the sound of clay shows us how different types of clay can produce distinctive sounds from one another. If we combine clay with water, we can feel the sense of squishing mud on the grounds of a forest or even near a river. On the other hand, clays that has been dried in a closed indoor environment, will turn to a hard clay, which will produce this clacking sound if it touches each other.

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combining tracing and patterns on paper

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How did you come into this world?

silky yet arbitrary skin

The way you touched my skin

Over and over again

It changes over time

Sometimes you melt

Sometimes you get hard

That’s the way you play with us

Where did you even come from?

From the deep grounds below us?

How can something so low

Become the most beautiful work of art?

You force us to move

You make us combine

Occasionally you needed friend

That’s when I collect stuff

Sticks to make patterns

Even to engrave my name on you

Don’t break on me, my clay

But the unpredictable ones

Are the ones that stick to your hearts

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Through the reading about clay on chapter 5 of Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, I learned that clay is not just something that we shape and mould to become an art piece.

“Clay is more than an art. Clay is living, because it holds potential”

When exploring and investigating clay, we have to see from different perspectives and different places. Such as in a closed atrium in a child care centre, or in a forest (with cool and damp environment) or even near a river, where water is not limited and easily accessible for children.

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Our first attempt with clay is a fun and exciting way to explore the texture and what they can and can not do.
One of the examples from art around the world is Rice Gallery’s ‘yamante’ by Yusuke Asai (Asai,2014), using soil from different places around the world. Looking at the video showcasing the artwork, made me question about lots of stuff:

1. Do they have any permission from the traditional owners of the land to take it away and use it for different purposes?

2. Does any of the aspects of the soil change as they move it to another place?

3. What inspires them to create this artwork?

4. How will they take the artwork down? Are they going to put it back where it belongs or just put it in the garbage?

5. What do they have to research before doing the artwork?

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As I mentioned above, one of my all time favourite quotes about loose parts is Simon Nicholson's quote "Loose parts empowers creativity". Visiting the NGV to do our assessment 2 opens our mind to the creativity that people and artists use in so many different ways.
Numbers of artists used loose parts to create something new by assembling and dismantling parts of objects.
Those artworks got me questioning:

What inspires people to make that?
Do they have any background information about those objects?
How do they know if it works?
Have they ever failed?
Or was the creation a result of bunch of failures?

These questions leads me to realize that in making creations out of loose parts, or even making your own creation out of something does not have to be "correct".
In fact there are no right or wrong way to make art.

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The moment I saw the video "The Land", which I watched in the class, my mind constantly started thinking of my dad.

Since I was a little, my dad always tell me stories about his childhood memories. I was always mesmerized by how fun it was. It was basically the same activities that the children from Wales did on "The Land" short movie. My dad used to live in an isolated area in Indonesia, and it was not a luxury life, but he was having lots of fun by given the opportunities to explore by his parents.

Living in this modern and futuristic world makes children nowadays feel priviledged of the technologies and toys that are made and can not be broken down, such as plastic toys. Creating an environment where children can build something with their own creativity will encourage them to think critically as each child has their own imagination of what they want to create.

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What do you see from this object below?
This object was made from junks or loose parts, such as sticks, bubble wraps, strings and ribbon.
I bet you can make something else from these loose parts

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Simon Nicholson

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Many people questions about loose part and what exactly does it mean. How does interacting with loose parts actually affect children's lives?
It all started in the year 1971, when Simon Nicholson introduced the term 'loose parts'.
Loose parts are objects that can be moved, carried, combined, redesigned, lined up, taken apart and put back together in different ways (Kable, 2010). When children are learning through play with loose parts, they are developing their creativity and imagination as they use them to create something new with their own different and unique minds.

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This is one of the artworks from National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. It was created by Camille Corot in the 1870s. This piece of artwork was not made just with paper and pencil, it was made by using a technique called etching.
This artwork taught me different kinds of aspects.
1. Learning from different perspectives
Just by having this experience to acknowledge Corot's artwork made me realize that before we make judgements and finalize our thoughts in one perspective might not be what the other side offers.
Using Carlina Rinaldi's pedagogy of listening will help to understand what the other person is trying to say.
2. Using different kinds of materials
It surprises me that there are numbers of ways to  create art using paper that includes not only just paper, but he also used metal, on the surface, which is called 'etching'.
As an educator we can provide children in learning with different kinds of techniques, not only just paper and pencil/crayon/paints and many more, but encourage them to try and experiment different kinds of ways to create art.

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From Carlina Rinaldi's reading 'The Relationship between Documentation & Asssessment' I can understand connect it with other theories, such as Lev Vygotsky's theory, more knowledgable others and zone of proximal development. Learning through materiality is different in every person, because they have experienced different things in their lives, which will affect their thinking and thoughts about different aspects.

Through zone of proximal development, we can listen to other's opinion, and accept frustation by being open to crisis (Rinaldi, 2004).

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There are different materials that we can explore everyday, especially in the first session during face to face session, we could combine variety of materials together to create something creative.

We made a creation out of parchment paper, newspaper and a piece of cardboard. We showed it to numbers of people and ask them to think creatively of what it is.
Here are the answers that we got:
- jellyfish
- willow tree
- rain or thunder
- fashionable hat
- sea weed
- hanging plants

These different opinions and thoughts leads me to thinking about creative imagination. Each and every one of us have different stories and experience of living for years and years, which will affect our own thinking in different aspects.

From this creation we can see that we are using three different materials, which are cut up newspaper, parchment paper and cardboard. Those three different materials came from the same type of resource, which are trees.

Looking back at the history of these three materials, makes me wonder how does people use their creativity to create different things from one resource? Came to my realization that wasting paper means that we are wasting the trees that the nature have put out in our environment.