The Wonders of Water and Sand

Children learn from many different forms of play, for instance functional play which is when children are constantly testing their environments, symbolic play which is when a child uses one material to represent another object, Constructive which is when children are creative and form something that is new and dramatic play. These forms of play can be displayed either alone in solitary play, alongside another individual in parallel play, observing others playing and incorporate your own ideas into the activity in associative play or even cooperating with other by building off everyone’s ideas to create something new in cooperative play. All these stages of play can be demonstrated and expanding through playing with sand and water.

From infants to adults, children of all ages can take part in sand play. Sand is therapeutic, non-threatening and has no expected end project. It is something that everyone can dig their hands and toes into, in fact, “it’s one of the few manipulatives that truly allow children to explore their imaginations, it’s a material found almost everywhere on earth, and children love playing in it” (King, 2005). For infants in this case it provides them with new textures for them to crawl in, they can simply sit down or move around, they involve their sense of touch by feeling the sand and digging their appendages into the dirt (Crowther, 2016, p. 89). As infants grow and become toddlers, they develop the ability to incorporate tools during their functional and symbolic play experiences. Using different instruments, toddlers begin to investigate sand further by using tools for activities such as tunneling, smoothing and experimentation, often repetitive play will become part of this process. Older toddlers incorporate tools into their symbolic play, they build off experiences that they’ve witnessed and begin to use other materials to represent different objects (Crowther, 2016, p.89). This symbolic play continues into preschool.

As toddlers’ transition into preschool students, symbolic play continues, yet becomes more complicated and “less reliant on props” (Crowther, 2016, p. 89). This would be a good age to introduce books to support sand play. Representational play becomes dominate within this age group where “role designation [is] involved” (Crowther, 2016, p.89). Representation play continues into school age children, but with the involvement of maps, scripts and plans.

The value of sand play is as mentioned above, it is therapeutic and non-threatening, it offers comfort and familiarity to the children. It offers an amazing learning experience for all ages, children learn how to measure different quantities of sand using different containers and compare the amounts of sand within each container or even compare their creations with others. C