Make Your Own Kinetic Sand

February 7, 2023 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

When my daughter was younger, like a lot of kids, she was really into sensory experiences. We made cloud dough and colored rice and pasta, and SO much homemade playdough I actually wrote multiple blog posts about it (this one was our favorite, except maybe the chocolate one, which I think I shared recently in a Valentine’s Day post).

One of her favorite things that I didn’t make was kinetic sand. Purchased kinetic sand is like regular sand, but it’s been coated with silicone oil, which gives the sand viscoelasticity. Which is a fancy science word for something that flows when not under pressure, but becomes a sort of rubbery solid under stress.

If you want to read more about the science of kinetic sand, check out this post from Live Science.

It’s not actually that hard to make kinetic sand at home, though I never tried it because we had plenty of the store-bought stuff.

There’s a recipe for a relatively small quantity at Crafty Morning, that combines the sand with an ingredient of a similar texture you’ll have to click over to read about.

If you want to make kinetic sand for a crowd, the Minnesota Children’s Museum has a bigger volume recipe that’s given in parts, so you can scale it up to fill a kiddie pool or down for a couple of kids to play with.

And how do you play with it? Kids won’t need a lot of instruction, you just squish it and mold it and see what happens. Cookie cutters and small, fillable molds are great to use with kinetic sand, as well as plastic knives, spoons, silicone baking cups, any little things you might use in small world play. If you have stamps like you would use with play dough that’s another great option.

[Photo: Crafty Morning.]

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Gross Motor Math Ideas

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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