What Are The Benefits of Sand Play With Toddlers?

Sand play is a great independent or collaborative activity. It can be carried out indoors or outdoors and provides a brilliant sensory base for finding objects, small world play, pouring, pushing, digging, fine motor and gross motor practice.

Is Sand Play Important?

Sand play is important as it has many benefits to a child. Children can practise their motor skills, they can work either collaboratively or independently and they can be creative. It opens up opportunities for conversation and team work. For these reasons, sand play is important.

How Should Sand Be Presented To Children?

Sand can be presented in a variety of ways to children. It can be indoors or outdoors, in a tray on a table or in a sandpit on the floor. It can take up the whole tray or it can be part of the tray along with other sensory bases. The children can just get their hands in it or they could sit in it.

If you’re close to a seaside, you could even make a daytrip of it and play in sand out in nature.

Questions to Ask During Sand Play

What are you building?

Could you make it taller/smaller?

What did you use to make that?

Why did you pick that tool?

What does this tool do?

How could you change what you’re making?

The key is to mainly act as an observer unless the child asks you to join in, and even then, follow their cues and don’t take over. Let them lead their own play and see where their creativity takes them.

Adults can sometimes stilt a child’s imagination by inadvertently taking over and leading a child through their play because the adult thinks a child should play with an object in a certain set way. This will, however, limit the child in their play and so taking a step back and acting as an observer allows the child to use loose parts and toys in a completely different way than intended but the child is using their imagination and exploring the items around them in this manner.

Sand Play Activities

1. Create a farm scene.
2. Provide buckets, spades and moulds to re-enact being on the beach.
3. Add dinosaurs and fake trees for a pre-historic landscape.
4. Provide bowls, scoops and spoons for moving the sand.
5. Create a beach scene with sand and water in a tuff tray. Add shells and sea creatures.

6. Add letters hidden under the sand. Provide cards with the same letters and the children can hunt the letters.
7. Mark making using sticks, fingers, paint brushes etc.
8. Ocean and beach clean up. Create a beach scene in a tuff tray and add some plastic pollution such as crisp packets, chocolate bar wrappers, a can, a straw, some netting. Children can clean up the beach scene with a net, scoops or tweezers.
9. Have a tea party in the sand. Provide cups, saucers, a tea pot and spoons and children can make “tea” using sand and shells.
10. Make footprints in the sand using some plastic toys and ask your child to identify them using a magnifying glass and the toys/photos of the toys.

11. Make pictures and patterns in sand using shells and stones.
12. Make sand “ice creams” using an ice cream set.
13. Hunt for buried pirate’s treasure.
14. Get the diggers out and move the sand around in your construction tray.
15. Have an i-spy game. Take photos of some small items to hide in the sand. Children are to search for the items by digging them out of the sand. They can tick them off the sheet once they’ve found them or place them on the picture.

16. Do some “baking” using sand in a tray. Provide silicon cupcake cases, a mixing bowl, wooden spoon, measuring spoons and jugs, cupcake trays and cookie cutters.
17. Hide real or fake coins in the sand. Children search for them and sort them into different bowls.
18. Use funnels and tubes (kitchen roll tubes or similar) and children can move the sand around the tray with scoops and spoons.
19. Use a sieve to find gems in the sand.
20. Use scales and find the correct amount of sand to make the scales balance.

Sand Play Toys