Sand Painting with Kids

If you are looking for something to add a new dimension to regular painting, sand painting just might be the ticket!  The tactile experience is something exciting for children.

I recently taught a unit on painting with sand to my third and fourth grade class.  You may remember my “how-to” blog post about this technique.  If you are wondering how we did our sand paintings, check out that post for all the details.  For a more advanced technique using adhesive board and x-acto knives, check out this other blog post about sand art.  I also did a review on a book by Naoshi, a sand artist.  After I received this book, I became all interested in how to use sand in art.  I never was before!  So, thank you, Naoshi for opening my eyes to the excitement of colored sand.

And let me tell you, the kids were SO THRILLED to be working with sand.  It is one of those projects that you don’t really get to do often in your lifetime.  I mean, I’m an art teacher and I’ve never worked with colored sand before!  I had other classes asking to use sand too and I have plenty of it, so I will probably have other classes play with it too.

I started the sand painting project by showing them my slideshow all about sand art, which is for the low price of $1 for a limited time.

First, we drew designs on matboards (which I got for free from a frame shop.)  Then we painted them with acrylic paints (tempera would probably work fine too.)  After the paint was dry, they drew lines with glue and sprinkled sand on top.  We also mixed a bit of glitter in too, which you can try if you are brave.  Again, check out my original post if you want step by step photos.

Here are some of our fun sand paintings!  The students had total choice of subject matter.