Sand play, especially building sandcastles, is a wonderful way to use sand play toys and support your toddler’s speech and language development. Here you’ll find speech therapy ideas to incorporate into your sand play activities. Let’s dig in! 

Sand play is a sensory-rich experience that encourages exploration of textures, supports fine motor skills and develops creativity and imagination. Building sandcastles creates opportunities for you to describe your toddler’s actions, encourage requesting, and support simple step-by-step sequences. 

You may suggest what to do next or join your child’s play by following their lead and modelling sounds, words and phrases that relate to their everyday experiences. 

Related Post: Child Led Play and Following Your Child’s Lead

Sand Play Toys

There are many sand play toys, including scoopers, buckets, spades and sand play moulds. You can also use kitchen utensils, like baking trays, sieves, and spatulas, and measuring equipment, like measuring cups. This variety allows for diverse and engaging sand play scenarios. These scenarios can support your child’s learning and speech and language development.  

Here are a few of my favourite sand play toys:

Sand Play Activities

Sand play can spark your toddler’s curiosity and expand their everyday experiences. It creates many opportunities to model a variety of speech therapy ideas. 

While this post specifically mentions building sandcastles, here are some other sand play activities that your toddler may enjoy:

• Going on a treasure hunt 
• Pretending to be a builder
• Exploring sand by hiding and finding items

Building Sandcastles

Following a Sequence

Building sandcastles follows a sequence of steps. For example, “dig the sand…. put it in the bucket… tip the bucket over… tap the bucket… and pull the bucket off”. Talking about the steps in the sequence helps your little one learn to sequence and organise the information. It also supports following multi-step directions in a motivating and fun way. You could use a visual sequence of the steps when building sandcastles together. Point to each step along the way. 

Recalling Sequences
At the end of the sand play activities or the end of the day, you could model remembering what you did with the sand play toys. You could also show the steps needed when building sandcastles. 

Building Sandcastles with Speech Therapy Ideas

Concepts and Vocabulary

One of the most effective ways to build your toddler’s vocabulary and concept knowledge is through modelling and repeating new words and phrases in context. Sand play provides opportunities to: 

• Label and describe sand play toys and equipment
• Label action and describing word
• Learn and talk about basic concepts and spatial concepts
• Use engaging sounds (e.g., “shhh”, wave sound), gestures (e.g., big, small) and fun words (e.g., “oh no”, “crash”, “ahhh”)

Here are some extra speech therapy ideas to include when you’re engaging with sand play

Read a Book

Picture books are a wonderful way to encourage word learning. They help children develop an understanding of routine or non-routine experiences. Picture books also support speech and language development. Characters from books are helpful to reference when building sandcastles (e.g., a favourite builder character). For example, when you build a sandcastle, you could link it to …

Related post: 7 Reading Tips for Parents 

Have you read this lift the flap book with your toddler?

Mitigable Gestalts and Short Phrases

Building sandcastles also creates opportunities to naturally model mitigable gestalts and short phrases. Gestalts are scripted language or chunks of language. Find out more about gestalt language processing in this related post: Journey through the two ways to develop language

Building Sandcastles and Stories

Here are some other speech therapy ideas to include:

a. Add a Story to the Sequence of Play Actions
A character could start by living in a beautiful castle. Then, the character faces a problem of someone ruining the castle. Finally, end the story with building sandcastles again. These storytelling activities support your child’s speech and language development by developing your child’s ability to sequence events, problem-solve and use language to describe actions and emotions. 

b. Role Play Construction Workers 
You can also support your child’s social play by role-playing different characters, like builders and construction workers. Encourage taking turns and saying social scripts for those scenarios. 

Speech Sounds with Building Sandcastles

Focusing on a specific speech sound when building sandcastles together can help with making listening to and practising speech sounds fun. First start with modelling lots of words with a specific speech sound. We use our lips for the sounds /p, b, m/, here are some examples of words beginning with these sounds.

This post was about building sandcastles. It included speech therapy ideas for sand play activities with some suggestions for sand play toys. Do you like building sandcastles with your toddler?