Last week, we explored making colored sand. This was a process that I wasn’t quite sure how to do so we experimented a bit…
The first time we used colored chalk to try and color the sand but this process just didn’t work out that well for us…
I think that the kind of chalk I used was part of the problem. I figured out that the cheaper and more powdery the chalk, the easier it is to color the sand. I also didn’t care for how pale the colors were so on our next try, we just added food color to the sand…
The sand we are using for this process is white sand that comes in a jar purchased at the Dollar Tree…
And the shaker bottles that I put the colored sand in come from Deals (which is like a Dollar Store). Â I had heard that if you bake the sand at a low temperature after adding food color, it will bake the color into the sand a bit better and possibly not leave color on your hands when you go to play with it. Â I did not try baking the sand but I might for future reference. Instead, we just mixed up the food color and sand in baggies then poured the sand in the shakers…
We used the colored sand to make veins in our paper leafs. Â The children first examined a real leaf then drew their own leaf veins on paper leaves with glue…
Then the children shook the colored sand on the glue…
Some of our students asked to make more than one leaf so we let them go at it…
Update
Some of our younger children simply made squiggly lines and circles on their leaves with the glue. One reason this is such a great process is that the children get to practice using a glue bottle. They are all getting quite proficient at managing the flow of glue from the bottle…