Sand Art in the Desert

Art and science are a good mix.  We combined a little art into our science study of the desert this week.  We used an sandstone activity from Janice VanCleave’s Science Around the World: Activities on Biomes from Pole to Pole book.  The activity called for salt instead of sand, but I didn’t have enough salt on hand so we attempted to do sand art with sand instead of the recommended salt.  It worked great.  We added food coloring to sand and ended up with 6 different earthy tones to use to make our sand art.  We put the different colors in bowls to scoop out.  We used black, red, green, blue, and yellow food coloring to make our different colors.

I had washed and dried out three different glass containers because I knew my little girl would want to do the activity too.  I was right.  I gave her a wide mouthed jar.  She finished quickly.

Once the containers were full of different layers of sand we squished them down and added more layers until we couldn’t fit anymore.  At that point the lids went on and they could turn their project to the side or upside down without it getting messed up.

This was just a little bit of messy fun.  Everyone needs some of that.