Educational benefits of sand and water play

April 12, 2015 | Marie-Elaine Leduc, conseillère pédagogique à l’éducation préscolaire, CSDM.

Sand and water playcan help children develop important skills and competencies. The information in this document was compiled by Marie-Élaine Dupont, an early childhood education consultant, to illustrate the “potential contribution [of such play] to the development of the target competencies of the Quebec Education Program for the preschool level.”

Background:

There is a regrettable tendency to eliminate certain activities and toys, such as sand and water play and building blocks, from preschool classrooms. The reasons are rational enough: too noisy, too messy …. And yet these activities offer many educational benefits for children ages 4 and 5. In fact, their versatility and transdisciplinary nature make them a good fit with the target competencies of Quebec’s preschool education program.

Educational benefits of sand and water play

School custodians don’t like it much, but dry sand is extremely affordable, and encourages children to explore the properties of liquids (sand behaves like a fluid) and concepts of quantity and volume.

Through sand and water play, children learn:

• To transfer materials accurately between containers (so they don’t overflow!)
• To control their gestures and movements
• To compare quantities in containers of different shapes (law of conservation of matter)
• The concept of time (using an hourglass)
• The concept of weight (using a weigh scale in the sandbox)
• That by adding water to sand, they can observe the phenomena of absorption and evaporation
• That wet sand behaves like a solid, and can be used to build bridges, mountains and valleys (geography)
• That sand and water play is ideal for making up stories about expeditions in the desert, animals in the savanna, and families at the beach

Accessories for water play:

• Funnels
• Siphons
• Water wheels
• Transparent and opaque tubes of different lengths, both rigid and flexible, and assorted plugs and corks
• Nesting cylinders for guiding the direction of water flow
• Lengths of eavestrough (rain gutter) for transferring water between containers
• Plastic bottles (concepts: quantity and volume)
• Sponges (absorption)
• Pipettes (capillary action, fine motor skills)
• Materials for building toy boats (creativity, problem solving, reading about different kinds of ships)
• Things that float and things that sink (testing hypotheses)
• Equipment for blowing bubbles (straws, rubber bands, tin cans)
• Food colouring

On your marks, get set … play!

Content based on the work of Anne Gillain?Mauffette, a retired educator from the Outaouais region of Quebec.