We always have a lot of fun with sand at our house! It’s one of our favorite simple sensory materials, but we hadn’t really done an activity with sand in a while. In fact, I had to look it up – most recently, both kids had played with Dried Out Halloween Quick Sand.
Today, I set up a Sandy Hearts Sensory Play activity for N. It was really really easy to set up, and with just sand, plastic hearts, and a few tools, N kept himself busy for almost 30 minutes! That’s a really long time for a young toddler 🙂
(N was 1 year and 6 months old.)
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Materials for Sandy Hearts Sensory Play
- Sand.
- Heart bracelets. {Other types of hearts will work just fine, too.}
- Tools like tongs, a shovel, a rake or similar.
- Shoe box sized storage bin to hold the sand and hearts.
- Bowl (optional).
One of the tools I offered N was a small pair of tongs. He’s been fascinated by them lately, but our regular kitchen tongs are much too big for him to use properly, and he had never used them in an activity.
He was very interested and spent the first few minutes exploring the tongs.
After some digging in the sand with his hands, he started using the rake to “scoop” sand out of the sensory bin and dropping the sand on the ground and his lap.
Sometimes, he caught a heart while doing this – he thought that was pretty amusing 🙂
Once he’d fished out all of the hearts and some of the sand, N decided to dump out the rest of the sand, then sit in it and run his hands through it.
This was what he did for about the first half of this activity. And then he suddenly got up, walked away – and came back with a yellow bucket from the sandbox!
He proceeded to place all of the hearts into the bucket before he started walking through the backyard. It really was the cutest thing 🙂
I think the first time all of the hearts fell out of the bucket and onto the ground, it was an accident. Maybe the second and third time, too – but I think at some point, he started doing it on purpose 😉 He spent quite a bit of time picking up hearts, putting them back into the bucket, and walking a few steps before repeating the whole thing.
He even decided to drive around on his Bobby Car, still holding on to his bucket full of hearts –Â
and dropping them over and over again.
I love how he incorporated this new item into his activity – and he was being super cute throughout 🙂
Do your kids enjoy playing with sand? What’s their favorite sand activity? Leave a comment below!
Check out these sand activities your kids may enjoy:
Sand Tray Writing by Learning 2 Walk
Sand Foam Sensory Play by Little Bins for Little Hands
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Great activity! Pinned : )
You are so right, he did stay Super Cute throughout. My kids always loved sand, and this is a great activity, and looks like he had a lot of fun, while being cute 😉 Thanks so much for joining in with the Love Blog Hop.
Thank you for the kind words, Helen! The Love Blog Hop was a lot of fun 🙂
Such a great activity! Thank you for sharing!
Thank you, Jessica!