Marble Ramps in the Sand Table

I’m always looking for new ways for children to move sand and water in the sensory table. Most of the time, sensory table activities focus on the basic activities of scooping, filling, and pouring. As children get older, and gain more experience with these tasks, they become less interesting. You can only scoop and pour so many times before you’ve mastered it and are ready to move on to exploring and manipulating the materials in a different way. 

I’ve experimented with different ways of setting up “apparatus” (to borrow Tom Bedard’s phrase) in the sensory table, mostly by adding different levels, or tables, or other surfaces with holes. One of my colleagues introduced a set up that provided a new dimension to the children’s sand play. She put the “marble run” pieces in the sand table.

The children were instantly drawn to the familiar experience of building the marble run.

But they discovered that sand doesn’t move the same why that marbles do.

The sand didn’t flow quickly down the ramps. This led to figuring out ways to move the sand more quickly - by pushing with fingers or wiggling the whole tower to get the sand to flow down. Some of the children changed their focus to filling the structure, using scoops and funnels and seeing how much sand they could fill at a time.

They noticed the sand cascading over the top, and in some cases, pouring quietly out of small cracks where the pieces fit together. The focus shifted again to figuring out how to plug up those cracks, or alternatively, how to make the sand flow out faster.

This set up held their interest for weeks. There was so much more to sensory table play than just scooping, filling and pouring.

Loose Parts in the Sensory Table

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about ways to introduce loose parts in the classroom 

with the idea that intentional planning of the environment can help the children structure their play in a way that is both open ended for children and manageable for adults.

One area of the classroom that lends itself to loose parts play is the sensory table. Very often, sand and water play focus on the simple tasks of filling and dumping. These skills are developmentally appropriate, especially for younger children, but are also self-limiting, because once the skills of filling and dumping are achieved, what’s next? The tools that children are given to fill and dump water and sand also sometimes interfere with their play. Buckets and shovels that are suitable for a sandbox take up too much space in the table, and children’s broad motions of scooping often fling sand and water onto other children and the floor, frustrating teachers and leading them to limit this play, or to wonder whether sensory table play is really worth it.

Adding loose parts (beads, shells, buttons, rocks, animals, etc.) to the material in the sensory table can open a whole new dimension of sensory play as children hunt for hidden objects, sort and classify, and pretend. Adding containers and scoops that are small enough to handle easily without taking up too much room or spilling on the floor can help make this area more manageable for adults.

Loose parts in sand lead to digging, hiding and searching, sorting, classifying, counting, and patterning. Combining different loose parts with containers that are different sizes and shapes encourages mathematical thinking and experimentation.

Adding an additional surface inside the table (a small shelf, or a hollow block or plank) gives children the work space to arrange objects and fully carry out their ideas.

Loose parts in water also lead to sorting, classifying, and counting, with the added opportunities to explore scientific properties like sinking and floating. Adding containers such as toy boats, cups, or plates give more objects to compare and experiment with.

Dark water (colored with black or blue liquid watercolor paint) is great to hide objects in and search for them.

Or, the sensory table can be filled only with loose parts – pom poms, rocks, shells, napkin rings, beads, etc. with small containers and scoops, spoons, or tongs for filling and dumping.

The magic of loose parts is providing children with that spark of imagination, creativity, and problem solving to think “what will I do with this?” How do buttons in the sand change the experience of playing with sand? How does filling a tube with sand and counting bears differ than filling a cup with sand and beads? As you add and change the tools for children to use with the sensory material, and encourage the children to add and change the tools as well, their thinking and their explorations change too.

A Table in the Sand Table - Part 3

I’ve experimented before with “a table in the sandtable” to provide children with a work area to place and arrange materials. I’ve also created pegboard surfaces that children could use not only to arrange materials, but to experiment with the physics of sand as it pours through holes. I had always used a full length, rectangular sensory table for these experiences, so switching to a classroom with a smaller, square table presented new challenges for how to design a similar play apparatus.

The solution was a smaller wire storage shelf. This one had parallel lines across the top instead of a grid, and I wondered if the children would use it differently. For a pegboard top, I used a Lauri rubber pegboard, held on with pipe cleaners.

As with the longer closet shelf and pegboard, the children were quick to use it as a table to rest their materials.

Someone discovered that plastic animals balanced easily between the metal bars. Someone else watched with concentration while pouring sand carefully through the holes.

And then, someone tipped the shelf over, and the activity was completely transformed.

The table, slats, and holes were forgotten. Now, the interesting part was seeing what could hook over the sideways table leg, and it became a convenient place to hang small buckets of sand, which quickly turned into a place to feed the toy animals.

Until someone turned the table completely upside down, and discovered another use.

And once again, I was amazed by the limitless extent of the children’s explorations, their ability to use and transform objects, and the endless experimentation that can happen when we give them the freedom to use the objects in their own way.

Thinking Small

I’ve written before about how the scale of art materials affects how children use them. Large paintbrushes and large paper elicit broad, wide brushstrokes, while smaller brushes encourage smaller and more precise movements across the paper. The same situation happens with sensory materials. Large scoops and shovels encourage large movements – which isn’t a problem unless the teacher doesn’t want vibrant, active movement at the sensory table. So often, teachers repeat the refrain, “keep the sand in the table” or “it’s not okay to throw sand”, after giving children huge shovels that naturally call for swinging sand over shoulders and across the table. And there are the natural spills that happen when a large bucket is filled and turned over. If the teacher wants the sand to stay in the table, then the first step is to plan the environment and choose materials that will make it easier for the sand to stay in the table.

In addition to helping classroom management, for younger children, smaller scale scoops and containers can be easier to hold and manipulate. It’s easier to fill a small container than a large one, and easier to provide enough material in the table for all the children to be able to fill their containers.

I set up a sensory table filled with moon sand, small plastic bowls, and measuring spoons. The measuring spoons have the added characteristic of being able to mold the sand into domes or balls. I added large plastic shapes that the children could bury in the sand, or use to fill their bowls.

Over several weeks, I changed the containers, and the objects that were hidden (or could be hidden) in the sand. The most appealing were small plastic animals, which they children covered, uncovered, and placed on top of the cakes that they molded in their containers. 

The one constant as the objects changed was that they were all small. Small enough to fit in their hands, small enough to hold a cup in one hand while holding a spoon in another, small enough to fill up and proudly feel a sense of accomplishment. And small enough for the children to clean their spills independently, allowing them to take ownership over their activity, instead of needing a teacher to manage it.

 

A Table in the Sand Table - Part 2

A few weeks ago, I wrote about putting "a table in the sand table" – creating a work surface that children could use to pile sand, arrange loose parts, and manipulate objects closer to their eye level. The pegboard had many interesting properties, but one problem. In some ways, it was too big for the table. It was difficult for children to reach under and around, and there wasn’t much space for children who wanted to dig and pour the sand without the table being in their way.

I decided to try a different type of surface – a long flat piece that would go across the middle of the table. Ideally I would have like to use wood, but with my limitations on time and material, I chose cardboard. I cut a long strip out of a cardboard box, and cut three large rectangles across the surface. Part of the children’s explorations with the pegboard “table” involved pouring sand through and pushing objects underneath. I wondered what they would do with larger holes that hands and objects could fit through.

I secured the cardboard strip to the sensory table with duct tape at the ends, and used masking tape to tape together two stacks of unit blocks to serve as supports in the middle. I taped down the cardboard to these supports to hold it in place.

Initially, the children’s main interest was the holes. Pouring sand through, dropping objects through, and sticking their hands through

One child said he didn’t want any holes, and asked me to cover them up. I gave him some pieces of cardboard, and he covered each hole, to create a solid surface. This added a new dimension to the play, which quickly shifted to piling sand on top of the cardboard slats, then pulling them away to watch the sand fall through the holes.

The cardboard strip and slats became not only a work surface, but a place for physics exploration, covering up holes, creating ramps, and balancing objects.

A Table in the Sand Table

One of the things I’ve always wondered about sensory table design is why there isn’t usually a convenient work area for children to place and arrange materials. Sensory tables are designed as deep receptacles where sand, water, and similar substances can be moved about without spilling over, but there isn’t any easy place to put a filled container on a solid surface to fill it, or to assemble a group of objects that you’re working on.

To solve this problem, I sometimes put a wire closet storage shelf inside the table, providing a convenient surface for children to set their cups and scoops on. And sometimes, the holes in the mesh provide another medium to experiment with, as children pour sand or drop objects through the holes.

After watching the children pour sand over and through the large square holes, I decided to attach a pegboard to the wire shelf, to see if they would be interested in experimenting with how sand pours through those smaller holes. I used a clear sheet of plastic drilled with rows of pencil size holes.

Some of the children noticed the movement of the sand through the holes, but for most of them, the pegboard was just another table. Some were interested in the texture of the surface, and the sound made by pushing the sand across the plastic. The next day I added paintbrushes to the sand, and the children swept and brushed the sand in swirls across the pegboard. But what interested them most was laying objects on the pegboard, and using it as a table, or as a palette or staging ground for their ideas.

Maybe it was the solid surface that held objects up so much better than loose sand does. Or maybe it was the visual perspective of being able to arrange and manipulate objects so much closer to their eyes and line of sight than deep in the bin of the sensory table. Whatever the reason, the table-in-a-table gave some extra scaffolding and support, both literally and psychologically.

                                           

Taking Sensory Play to the Next Level

I’ve always wondered why older preschoolers tend to ignore the sensory table. Is sand and water play boring? Is it just that there are more exciting things to do in the classroom? Toddlers and young 2’s and 3’s can’t seem to get enough of sand and water play, scooping and pouring it

in and out of containers, watching it flow, mastering the concepts of empty and full.

But in the older classrooms, the sand table, with its scoops, measuring cups, and funnels, slowly gets left behind in favor of other activities. As I watched the children play with the sand less and less as time went on, this thought occurred to me: it’s not that the sand itself isn’t interesting, it’s that the children have mastered the tasks we provided. They learned how to scoop and dump. They figured out what it means for something to be empty and full. What they needed was something new to figure out. They needed to do more than the simple motion of manipulating sand from one container to another. They needed materials that involved more complicated problem solving – materials that said to them “hey, figure this out.”

My inspiration came from an amazing blog: Sand and Water Tables by Tom Bedard. Tom’s blog documents his development and use of different sensory table “apparatus” in his preschool classroom. I was awed by the complexity and limitless problem solving opportunities his materials provided. I decided to start small – with two pegboards supported by wooden dowels, creating a “two-story” platform for the sand table.

Interest in the area increased at once. The children had experienced the process of simply pouring sand, but watching the process of sand flowing through holes was something new. Could the sand be piled up and the holes blocked? Would pushing the sand with hands or a brush make it flow through faster? Was there a way to slow or increase the flow between the two levels? A large group of children gathered around, experimenting, watching, and testing as they poured, brushed, and blocked the sand as it flowed.

This was more than just sensory play and experiencing the sensation of sand on hands. This was engineering, problem solving, and scientific theorizing. This was an opportunity for children to pose questions and figure out the answers for themselves. It was a chance to figure out how things work, and to take their play, literally and figuratively, to the next level.