Backyard Adventures

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Unless you want to enforce schooltype discipline, the kids will splash and throw water. Crushed rock or gravel will stay put on the bottom while sand will splash out with the water, to get into silky young hair and small eyes.

Crushed rock and washed gravel are available from any aggregate-supply outlet. You won't want a dump truck full and you can buy it in bags, or you can get crushed marble and other decorative rock at most large nurseries. For a small table, you might find it easiest to buy fish-tank-bottom gravel from the pet store. The cheapest is natural stone, though the kids love to mix up a variety of virulent neon colors that hurt my eyes. Adding a new bag of a fresh color once in a while will enliven a slow afternoon.

Moving Water

Remember when you were a kid, how fascinating it was to play in a little stream? You could dam it up, float sticks down it, and imagine you were Tom Sawyer rafting the Mississippi. Block up one end of the water table an inch or two, with shorter supports every few inches downhill, hold the end of the garden hose in one corner with a brick, and leave the water on in a small flow. Let the overflow run over at the other end or drill drain holes to control water level. Experiment so water flow is strong enough to flow through but not so strong it erodes "land" areas. If it is the dry season, you can conserve water by running the overflow to your garden or permanent plantings.

You can attach elaborate faucets and drain cocks, but they just add weight. And you'll want td be able to move the table each day, lest the lawn under it become a swamp. A 1 1/2" hole in the bottom with a sink drain plug will ease emptying. A pair of 2" x 3"s with ends cut in an up angle and screwed to the bottom of the table, with a rope loop at one end, will make one-parent moving easier.

TOYS FOR SAND & WATER

Sand and water are fluid materials that kids will configure as their imaginations dictate. But, if castle walls, riverside piers, or Matchbox-car garages are to be much more than humps in the sand, young builders need something rigid to form or reinforce walls, platforms, and roofs. Plus, the children need mobile toys to carry their imaginations through the formed media.

Long, narrow wooden blocks are better for reinforcing sand castles than conventional squares and rectangles. Wooden wheeled excavators and trucks are good to move the sand around. Plus, they will float to serve as boats, barges, bridges, and rafts on the water table.

I made blocks and toy sand movers from woodshop scraps: hardwood left over from furniture projects and softwood from building-materials cutoffs. You'll have a few feet of 2" x 3" and plywood left over from making the water table. If you don't have a shop of your own, see if you can salvage leftovers from a local lumber finisher, a commercial furniture maker, or a neighborhood woodworker. Check building sites for ends of 2-by framing lumber and other scrap. You might see if local hardware stores, supermarkets, outdoor sports, or camping goods outlets, or roadside stands sell wood stove or vacation camp fire kindling. Stores near me sell plastic-wrapped packages of assorted factory scrap hardwood for $3.00—expensive to start a fire, but far less than you'd pay for the equivalent board-footage of raw building stock.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print