INSPIRATIONS - sand

A spectacular seaside and sandpit activities inspiration special!

Introduction

Welcome to Muddy Faces Inspirations: bringing together activities & ideas with a specific theme, to inspire your time outdoors playing, learning & connecting with nature. Follow the highlighted links to take you to our step-by-step activity guides.

The beach is a perfect place to find inspiration - filled with natural resources where children (and adults) can spend hours exploring, playing, constructing, digging and so much more!

We've collected some of our favourite activities together here.

What you'll need

A beach - or you could recreate the beach with a sandpit and some water and natural materials.

Useful items:

substantial digging spade
bucket (clear buckets are great for looking at rock pool finds)

This activity has been provided by

Useful items from our shop

Item available from our shop

Environmental Considerations

Consider the environmental impact of preparing, carrying out & completing this activity. Could this impact be reduced? Specific considerations for this activity could include:

leave no trace
consider carefully what you remove from the beach - look here at Countryfile's beach combing guide
foraging - see our Tips for foraging

Health & Safety Considerations

Follow your usual operating procedures and carry out appropriate risk benefit assessments.
Some considerations particular to this activity include:

coastal safety - tides, mud flats etc

Play with perspective

You can have so much fun with a camera - forget selfies and create some magic photos using perspective!

Can you hold a friend in your hand?!
Can you balance on top of a razor clam?!

Collecting Shells & Balancing Pebbles

Collecting shells and making patterns with them is great fun.

Balancing is great too - how many limpet shells can you balance on top of each other without them falling over?

Stack some pebbles and then use them as a target to knock over!

Stone landmarks/cairns can be seen in the Arctic region. They are called 'inukshuk'. They may have been used historically for navigation or to mark a food cache amongst other things.

Beach Art

You can just sit down almost anywhere on the beach and start creating! From making mini gardens, going big with drawing, crazy collage, to decorating pebbles - the beach is your oyster!

& making faces... simple or 3D

Construction & Design

Building sand castles, digging holes and channels and making bridges - will they be strong enough to beat the tide?!

Exploring & Investigation

Get your net and bucket and see what you can find.

Find some crabs, explore a rockpool and look for other beach flora & fauna. How many varieties of seaweed can you identify?

If you put anything in a bucket to get a closer look remember to put it back where you found it.

Coastal foraging

Check out these links for tips and advice on coastal foraging.

RNLI: Give it a go - coastal foraging

From leaves like samphire and sea beet to seaweeds, blackberries, beech nuts and violets – you’ll be amazed at the abundance and variety.

Totally Wild UK: Foraging at the coast & by the sea

Britain is surrounded by water, we have coast in every direction and with that comes a massive abundance of coastal edible plants and Seaweeds.

Crabbing & fishing

Links to websites, blogs & guides to crabbing & fishing.

Beach games

Kite flying
Spin a bucket of water and learn about centrifugal force
Scavenger hunt
Beach cricket / rounders
Beach hop scotch
Limbo - how low can you go?!
Water bucket relay - fill a bucket by going back and forth with a cup of water - who will fill the bucket first?
Cover a friend with sand and draw a sea creature body for them!