Say hello to your new favourite kids craft DIY.
Kinetic sand is a mouldable, squishable, soft type of sand which is amazing for sensory play with small children. It holds it's shape better than regular sand, which means it easy to cut, shape and play with. My own children are mesmerised when we get our kinetic sand play set out. We make mini sandcastles, cut shapes using play dough cutters and test out making different textures and pressing objects into it.
You can buy some great starter kinetic sand kits out there – we've added a few of our favourites below, but where the real fun begins is when you make your own!
There are so many different kinetic sand recipes out there on the internet. You can transform regular play sand into kinetic sand by adding a couple of easy-to-find ingredients – mainly cornflour (aka corn starch if you're in the States) and an agent to add the extra firmness – we've used vegetable oil here but you can also use a mix of water and washing up liquid.
When it comes to play and craft ideas for kids, sand comes top of our list every time. We've carefully tested out a few different recipes to try the various options for ingredients and put together this guide for how to make kinetic sand for you using our favourite recipe.
We have used regular play pit sand for our tutorial but you can also use coloured play sand (£11.95 for a pack of 6 colours, Baker Ross) if you want to get bright colours without using food colouring.
You might also like our favourite crafts for toddlers, or try our play dough recipe and easy salt dough recipe.
What is kinetic sand?
Kinetic sand is regular sand but with some added ingredients which give it amazing qualities to hold its shape more firmly than regular sand.
While regular sand naturally dries out in time, kinetic sand remains slightly wet to the touch so you can cut and squish it to make a huge array of shapes. This makes it hugely popular for STEM learning and sensory play with small children.
Instead of being coated in water, the grains of sand are instead coated in silicone oil, which doesn't dry out in the way sand on a beach does.
To put it more technically, the science behind it is that Kinetic sand is a mix of 98% and 2% Polydimethylsiloxane, which has a structure which contains carbon-silicon bonds. This gives the sand a slightly elastic, firm quality which makes it amazing for messy play and truly magical for children.
