Here's How to Make Your Own Kinetic Sand — And What to Do With It

To make kinetic sand super pliable, Little Bins For Little Hands adds glue to the basic recipe of sand, dish soap, and corn starch. Once the sand is made, the substance keeps together for a few weeks before drying out completely. Just make sure you keep this one in an airtight container!

This kinetic sand recipe from One Little Project keeps it super simple with just sand and shaving cream. The shaving cream gives the sand a super foamy texture. The foamy texture of the sand doesn’t last very long, so you’ll have to keep adding shaving cream if you want to keep it mushy. While this qualifies as kinetic sand, it doesn’t keep as long as the typical recipe.

Mom Dot uses food coloring to dye a basic kinetic sand recipe of sand, corn starch, hand soap, and water. If you want to make a bunch of colors, plan on buying a few bags of sand. 

Once you’ve picked out the texture and recipe that is right for you, get working to make your very own kinetic sand. You’ll definitely want to try out a few of the activities below when you have a batch ready to go. 

Kinetic sand is a great tool to use to help improve those letter writing skills. The pliable sand provides some resistance, allowing kids to get a feel for holding their writing utensil properly. The sand also helps kids understand how much pressure they should put on their pen or pencil. Head on over to Stir The Wonder to see how you can set up your very own kinetic sand writing tray. 

Even if you’d much rather be on a beach playing with real sand to make sandcastles, this kinetic sand block building activity is a solid substitute. Grab a pack of plastic building blocks and fill them up with sand. Because the blocks are hollow on the inside, the sand will form a mold of the block. When you’ve formed a few blocks, stack them into a high tower or channel your inner engineer and build a structural kinetic sand house. Check out the details on Fun Learning For Kids. 

Kids who love pretty much anything remotely related to trucks and digging will want to check out this kinetic sand construction sensory bin activity. The activity uses the kinetic sand to mimic an active construction site that needs to be cleared out. Your job is to use your trucks and excavators to grab all of the unwanted material out of the sand. So, think you’re up for the challenge? Grab your hard hat and get digging!

With this kinetic sand letter mold activity, little ones can explore their letters all while playing in the sand at the same time. To make this activity run smoothly, you’ll need a set of letter molds or cookie-cutter alphabet stamps. If your child is just starting to read, help them use the molds to spell out words. If it’s too soon for that, let your little ones play around to get familiar with their ABCs. 

If you’ve got a little one at home who can’t get enough of bugs, you’ll love this DIY insect sensory bin activity. Fill a big bin with kinetic sand and hide plastic bugs and critters all around the bin. Make sure you cover them with sand! Then let your little ones get to work with their nets and shovels to see just how many bugs they can catch. Don’t love bugs? Use any plastic toy to bury in the sand and see just how many you can find.

When giant wooden puzzle pieces go missing, the whole toy gets pushed to the side. But this kinetic sand activity is an ingenious way to give old wooden puzzle pieces new life as stamps. Set out a bunch of kinetic sand on a sheet pan or on a table. Then, use the puzzle piece stamps to make different designs in the sand or just have fun squishing the pieces around. Check out the details over on Still Playing School.

See you later mud pies! Thanks to kinetic sand, your pretend food can now be a lot cleaner and much easier to clean up. Head to The Craft Train where she’ll walk you through how to make pancakes, aka “sandcakes,” popsicles, and kinetic sand cookies. Don’t stop with those three items. Keep the menu going and see just how many kinetic sand food items you can make. Who knows? You might even be able to open your own kinetic sand restaurant.