A loom is a tool used in weaving to help knit threads together to make a single piece of cloth. Loom technology is ancient, dating back at least to ancient Greek society. Since the invention of mechanized looms, large scale fabric production has become much more common.

With a little creativity, the loom serves several developmental purposes for the preschool child. Using pipe cleaners adjusted into the shape of a circle, your little one sorted and created patterns on their looms. This taught your little ones important skills like focusing on a task and following directions.

And planning color combinations and deciding how to use them in different patterns also stimulated creativity. This goes along with persistence, and it’s an important skill for young children to have as they enter their school-age years.

As children learn, they will rarely succeed the first time, and will need to be patient to keep trying again. Not becoming frustrated and knowing how to work through setbacks–which can definitely happen as learn how to make different and more complicated patterns on the loom–is an important skill for preschoolers to develop.

Putting all those tiny pipe cleaners together also requires some good fine-motor coordination.  What will something look like when it’s created using a pattern? How does an object or a shape appear when it’s turned upside down, sideways, and rotated? When working with the loom, students developed all these skills as they created the patterns they wanted to make. And being able to visualize things is an important skill in math, which makes the loom a deceptively fun math-related activity.