After seeing the television advertisements, O has wished for his own Kinetic Sand set for months. I’m not a huge fan of sensory and messy play – goodness knows I have enough mess to clear up to start off with – so when I was asked if we would like to review the Kinetic Sand Sandcastle set, I thought of O’s little face… He’d be so happy to finally play with Kinetic Sand! So I put all of my cleanliness anxieties to one side and thought we’d roll with it…
The Kinetic Sand Sandcastle set consists of a sand tray, bag of blue kinetic sand, scraping tool and three moulds in the classic beach shapes; a crab, a starfish and a sandcastle.
Pour the sand into the sand tray, and you’re good to go! I was pleasantly surprised at the texture and consistency of the sand. Once you’ve given it a good kneading to warm it through, it almost flows when trying to sprinkle it. I half-expected it to get stuck to hands and fingers during play too, but it didn’t.
Now, O was under strict instructions to play with the sand in the sand tray only – in my attempts to minimise clean-up afterwards. He did a pretty good job, but there were bits that ended up on the tablecloth and tiled kitchen floor. They were easily picked up at the end of play by using a small blob of sand to pick up the smaller pieces – a bit like you would do with plasticine. It was easy to do, but I wouldn’t like to try and get it out of the carpet (the instructions state that it vacuums out, but I personally wouldn’t like to try that out on my cream carpets).
O loves playing with the Kinetic Sand Sandcastle set and did a great job of filling the moulds up and turning them out. It would have been nice for the sand to be a different colour to the tray as it’s all quite blue, but this didn’t hinder the play experience.
Do you have any of the Kinetic Sand sets? What do you think of them?
Disclosure: We were sent the product for the purposes of this review, however all words and opinions are our own.
O is obviously having a great time judging by the look of concentration on his face :o) We had something that looks like it could be similar, I think it was called Moon Sand, and it was really lovely to play with.
#TriedTested
He looks like he is really enjoying it. Alice has a set and I was a bit like you, is it going to be mess free. I place the sand tray in my large roasting tin and line it with cling film, this seems to keep it all contained! It is a really great idea and I was impressed that it was pretty much mess free. x #triedtested
Oh my girls would love this, we tried a tiny packet of it once and I always thought it would be better if there was enough to build castles. I agree about it all being a bit blue though!
Nat.x
I think it’s the luck of the draw what colour sand is inside the box tbh, but it is very blue! O doesn’t seem to mind though x
My girls got given something like this that I expected to be really messy and a pain, but it was great! This looks like that stuff, he looks very happy with it!