A sand table or sandpit will provide plenty of opportunity for sensory play. Sand is great to move around, build, draw, craft and it’s very soothing to touch. Children naturally love to explore and investigate.
Sand play is a great way to inspire and enhance learning. Sensory play expands the children’s creativity and imagination, stimulates their senses and introduces them to new textures.
Benefits of playing with sand:
- Improves fine motor skills
- Sensory play and calming experience
- Provides creative and imaginative play
- Language development
The fun never stops with sand play! Here are our top 6 ideas for sand play at home.
1. Treasure Hunt
Let’s go on a treasure hunt! This activity is great for a sand table or sandpit. Simply hide toys in the sand and let your children find them using their hands or spades.
Try different themes for your treasure hunt. You could hide shells and give children buckets to find them, like they are at the seaside. Another idea is to hide toy fish and collect them in small nets.
2. Building Site
Children love filling and emptying. Get your children to transport and tip the sand into different zones of the sand table or sandpit. Make roads using a toy truck and houses using buckets. Add a hard hat and fluorescent safety vest to play the part.
3. Beach Scene
Oh we do like to be beside the seaside. Make an outing to the garden more exciting with a beach scene. Perfect for encouraging your children to get digging, raking and making shapes in the sand. Provide a collection of resources for the beach scene. For example, shells, small pebbles, toy figures and buckets. Different themes are great for sand play. Create themes that your children love such as jungle animals or dinosaurs.
4. Sand Art: Decorative Jars
Let’s get crafty. For this activity, we would recommend using craft sand. Fill small jars or bottles with layers of different coloured sand. Add each layer carefully using a spoon or funnel. Decorate the jars or bottles before putting the sand in and screw the lid on top. Add a ribbon around the top of the lid as decoration.
5. Sand Art: Pictures
There are lots of exciting ways to make different patterns and pictures in the sand. Collect various shells and let your children design a pattern or picture in a sand table or sandpit. Use different objects to create the pictures. Your children could design a jungle animal or seaside picture in the sand.
6. Sand Shakers
Collect various containers from home and get your children to use their hands or spades to fill up the containers. Try glass jars, plastic bottles, small tins, sweet tubes and more to produce different sounds. You could even decorate the shakers as another activity to do at home.
