Sand Inducted into Toy Hall of Fame

The Strong, the American National Museum of Play, just inducted sand into its Toy Hall of Fame. That’s right, you read it right - sand. Like sand on the beach, in your hair, in your car - sand. On November 4th 2021, alongside the game Risk and American Girl dolls, sand was picked as a top 3 contender among the 12 finalists. It even beat toys like Cabbage Patch Kids and games like Settlers of Catan! The internet had a little bit of fun with this announcement, but many people seemed to approve overall. After all, sand has really stood the test of (all) time, is free, and is fairly easily accessible. It is being praised for the variety of activities humans can engage in when using sand. According to their website, https://www.museumofplay.org/toys/sand/, “Sand provides unique opportunities for tactical, physical, cooperative, creative, and independent free play.” I couldn’t agree more, and I witness this regularly.

As an on-call teacher, I’m in a different school or classroom pretty much every day of the week. If I’m not teaching in a primary class, I’m likely to walk past one. Most of these classrooms have play ‘centres’ that the students engage with daily, as a part of the learning experience. I can say without a doubt that whenever a sand centre is an option, it’s a popular one. I love that it is non-gendered and essentially limitless (though the ‘mess potential’ is high with this one). Over the past years, kinetic sand has become very popular as well, being less messy and dusty than classic sand.

While exploring the Toy Hall of Fame’s profile of sand, I learned that “[a] charitable group in Boston formed the first sand garden in 1885. The group deposited a pile of sand in a Boston chapel yard and invited children to dig with small shovels and to make sand pies. Sand gardens provided a space for children… to employ [both] free and directed play.... These sand gardens launched the playground movement in America.” Learning this helped me realize that many parts of playgrounds could be classified as ambiguous, which is a key component of Imaginative Play. If you’ve ever taken kids to a playground, or even walked past one, you’ll know they can think of a million different ways to use these rigid, unchanging structures. Can you imagine what they could create if there were more moving parts, more potential, more creative avenues? The limitless potential behind my goals for an Imaginative Play space is intoxicating.

Source: https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibits/toy-hall-of-fame/