Beading helps to develop fine motor skills, eye hand coordination and even math skills as children must follow patterns and decide how long to make something. Using some sand and glue, you can make your own sand beads and create one of a kind creations!
Time: 30 minutes (beads need to dry overnight or longer depending on humidity)
Age: Any Age
Level: Medium
Materials
Vegetable oil or baby oil (for hands)
Disposable plastic container (we used a margarine container)
String or elastic for beading
Find some clean, dry sand. We used sandbox sand, and shook it through a sieve to make it more fine. Start with about 1 cup.
NOTE: Our sand was quite course and we found it a bit hard to work with. If you have course sand, perhaps try adding half sand, half flour and it may be easier to form the beads.
Add white glue. Cover hands in oil and start mixing. We kept adding glue until the mixture was able to take forms and hold them.
Roll the sand and glue into balls. Put a skewer through the balls so that you can thread a string through.
Let the balls dry at least overnight. We found ours needed about 36 hours before they were completely dry.
Experiment with different shapes and try making cylindrical beads too!
Paint and decorate your beads as you wish. I applied a sealer over the glitter beads to prevent the glitter from coming off. We also used Mod Podge to put flower and skull motifs on our cylinder beads.
We ended up making paper beads to go on our necklaces as well. I printed off pirate and flower paper (available as free downloads via google) and followed the directions from magazine bead bracelets found
here.
String your beads and fasten to create your own unique necklace!
