Building Learning into Sand Play

Summer holidays really lend themselves beautifully to sand play – at the beach, in the garden or at the park. Building in a bit of learning whilst having fun doesn’t need to be complicated. Sometimes spending 5 minutes of focused time with a child, engaging in their play, can be enough to give them a little boost with their learning and confidence. Also allow lots of time for independent exploration.

Language development

Whilst playing, reinforce action words/verbs (pour, fill, dig) and describing words/ adjectives (gritty, rough, wet) to help children to understand what these words mean in a real-life context. As we mentioned in our playdough blog, verbs are a very important part of language development helping children to move from using single words into building short phrases and sentences.

Mathematical understanding

Using lots of containers of different sizes (cups, buckets, bowls) helps children to develop their understanding of quantity and measuring. Count how many cups of sand are needed to fill a bucket. This learning can be extended by estimating how many cups would be needed to fill a larger/smaller container. Measuring using jugs is great for those who are further along with their understanding of numbers.

Small world

Create variety in your sand tray by using different small world toys to encourage your child to imagine, act out or use symbolic noises in their play. Dinosaurs, diggers and farm animals are a great place to start but there are no limits to the worlds you can create from ‘life on Mars’ to ‘Ancient Egypt’.

Social interaction

Engaging with your child whilst they play supports the development of their social skills. Have fun taking turns to pour sand through a sieve or to knock down a sandcastle. Build shared attention and anticipation with the phrase ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’

 Top tip

Support your child’s development of independence and daily living skills by making cleaning up part of the fun. Encourage your child to use a mini dustpan and brush to collect up sand which has escaped from the sand tray or to wash up their sand toys in soapy water. Their efforts might be haphazard but praise them for giving it a go, over time this will improve. Including ‘cleaning up’ opportunities from an early age helps to make this a little more automatic and less of a battle later on.

To get more of our top tips and tools join our Confident Communicators Group (supporting development for 2 – 5 year olds).

The group is open to parents/ carers/ grandparents and early years practitioners.

Do come along and join us!