Sticky Sand Sensory Play

 

A couple of months ago, E spent a lot of time in the sandbox and always tried to make “cakes” and “castles” for her Daddy, her then-unborn little brother and me <3 They often crumbled way more easily than she would’ve liked, so I decided to “pimp” her sand a little bit and turn it into sticky sand with just two simple ingredients that are in your kitchen right now!

 

(E was 3.5 years old.)

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For sticky sand sensory play, you’ll need:

• Sand. {You can use beach sand or play sand; colored sand would be fun, too.}
• Flour.
• Vegetable oil. {It’s what we used but baby oil will work, too, just like in cloud dough.}
• Sensory bin.
• Loose parts (optional) – we had glass gems, glitter pom poms, and golf tees.
• Cups and/or spoons (optional) – we had ice cream sundae cups and an ice cream scoop.

 

 

 

How to make sticky sand:

The recipe is pretty much a cloud dough recipe {here’s one for Multicolored Cloud Dough} where some of the flour is replaced with sand. Basic cloud dough proportions are 8 cups of flour to one cup of oil, and we replaced a bit more than half of the flour with sand. For the full recipe, check out Growing a Jeweled Rose’s Sticky Sand Dough post.

 

 

 

We put the sand and flour into our sensory bin first, and E put her whole body into mixing it thoroughly.

 

 

She played with the sand/flour mixture for a bit before we added the oil.

 

 

Once the oil was mixed in, E suddenly said we should make a snowman – and I certainly couldn’t think of a reason why we couldn’t! 😉

 

 

Now that we had a perfectly nice sticky sand snow man, we obviously needed a carrot nose for him! E was very adamant about this, and tried to stick it in his face but it was very hard to do. The “snow balls” tended to start crumbling under too much pressure.

 

 

Finally, she asked me to try, and I got it in for just a second but it fell out before I was able to grab the camera.

 

 

Still, E seemed to be satisfied and moved on to exploring the loose parts, cups and ice cream scoop.

 

 

It didn’t take long for her to start putting sticky sand into a sundae cup and presenting the ice cream to me.

 

 

I showed her how to turn the cup over, and as expected, the sand stuck together quite well.

 

 

E decorated my “sand cake” with a golf tee, then immediately started refilling the sundae cup to make a cake herself. She was a bit slow turning the cup over, so only the bottom stayed intact.

 

 

She went on making sand cakes and flattening them over and over,

 

 

until Papa joined her and started playing with the sticky sand as well. They both decorated their creations and pretended to taste them.

 

 

Papa came up with the idea of using the golf tees for stability and discussed it with E. 

 

 

He also showed her how to pack the sand even more tightly,

 

 

so tightly that he was able to hold it in his hand.

 

 

When they were done, they played with the golf tees and tried to toss them in such a way that they got stuck standing up in the sand. {They didn’t have much luck but lots of fun.}

 

 

After lunch, E went right back to her sticky sand. After making a bunch of “cakes” {I thought she got really good at it!}

 

 

she decided to get some of the pompoms she’d pretty much ignored up to this point

 

 

and use them for decoration.

 

 

To round out her sandy sensory experience, she stood in the box and felt the sticky sand with her feet – one of her favorite ways of ending sensory play.

 

 

How do you like to play with sand? Have you tried sticky sand? Leave a comment!

 

Here are some more fun and simple sand play ideas!

Baby Play with Sand

Fizzy Shaving Cream Sand Dough

Squishy Sand Sensory Play

{Very Sandy} Sand Slime

 

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