Sand and Water are wonderful natural media which enables children to learn through their imaginative and creative ideas.
Developmental Advantages of Sand/Water Table Play
By Marianne Gibbs, MOT, OTR
Sand/water table play supports the whole child in developing skills necessary for learning and life.
Physical-motor development
Standing at the sand/water table facilitates the use of fingers, hands, arms and trunk while maintaining overall balance and coordination of the body. Playing and digging with shovels, funnels, and scoops in the sand or water provides resistive activity, which supplies the muscles and joints in the hands and arms with information that is sent to the vestibular and proprioceptive sections of the brain. This increases body awareness and allows practice of grading of muscle use for different daily activities.
Eye-hand coordination and fine motor skills such as shoulder stability, forearm rotation, wrist control, and hand grasp-skills needed for future writing are facilitated by sand/water table play.
Physical-motor skills include:
Kinesthetic learning (children learn through active physical engagement)
Vestibular/Proprioception (facilitates body awareness)
Balance and coordination of the body
Eye-hand coordination
Fine motor skills (facilitates future handwriting efficiency)
Cognitive Development
Sorting items and problem solving are cognitively based skills. The sand/water table allows cognitive skills to be integrated with physical play, which creates a dynamic and engaging learning environment that supports cognitive development.
Cognitive skills include:
Investigation
Observation
Problem Solving
Classifying
Comparing
Cause and effect
Curiosity and imagination
Conceptual understanding (volume, measurement, properties)
Construct explanations and understanding through reasoning and logical thinking
Sensory Development
Playing in a variety of media possessing different textures offers opportunities for children to experience and discriminate a multitude of sensory information through the skin. Stereognosis skills are worked when children feel and identify items (e.g. toys in sand) that they cannot see.
Sensory skills include:
Tactile discrimination
Stereognosis (feel and identify items without seeing them)
Social Development
Interactive and pretend play is how children learn and develop social skills such as verbal communication, sharing, helping, compromising, requesting, offering, and friendship building. The sand/water table can be considered a smaller version of the beach!
Social skills include:
Peer interaction
Friendship-building
Sharing
Helping
Compromising
Speech and Language Development
The gathering of children around an emotionally engaging activity promotes the use of spontaneous speech and language.
Speech and language skills include:
Spontaneous speech
Question-asking
Requesting
Offering
Discussion of observations
Conceptual language (empty/full, warm/cold, wet/dry, etc)
